Coelho, Tony rep d ccc

aha, why so many fewer dems than gop? tho tony coelho got dems in game:

no merri

=-=-

-=-=

=-=-=

AM 8 26

Most discussions about the Democratic Party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats (such as Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who yesterday scored an upset win in the Democratic contest for the Florida Senate).

An equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats.

Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend Democratic strategist James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016 — especially that of Bernie Sanders — that he believes fractured the Democratic coalition.

“Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” Carville said recently, claiming that Bernie’s primary challenge to Hillary Clinton convinced voters in battleground states that establishment Democrats were no different from establishment Republicans, thereby weakening her prospects in the general election.

Even if James is right about 2016 (and I don’t believe he is) his assessment is irrelevant now because we’re at a radically different point in American politics than we were 10 years ago.

The silver lining on the dark storm cloud of Trump and his detestable regime is that it has exposed the greed, venality, cupidity, and corruption of America’s corporate elite.

Trump has allowed the CEOs of giant corporations and the titans of Wall Street to do whatever they want as long as they suck up to him. And he’s providing all sorts of corporate welfare to those who generously bribe him — no-bid government contracts, exclusive licenses, tax loopholes, tariff exemptions, use of public lands, and permission to become even bigger monopolies.

Trump has thereby unveiled a truth about corporate America that for many years has been hidden behind a soothing blanket of corporate PR bullsh*t about social responsibility, corporate charity, and “trickle-down” economics.

That truth is the captains of corporate America are so rapacious that they’re willing to throw average working Americans under the bus to make billions more.

Corporate avarice under Trump has become so blatant and corporate America’s contempt for the needs of average Americans so flagrant that most Americans are now catching on.

They’re voting for progressive Democrats not because they want socialism, support the Democratic Socialists of America, or reject candidates called “moderate.”

They’re voting for candidates whom they believe will fight to make housing, food, healthcare, and childcare affordable to average working families. And who’ll take on Trump’s billionaire backers, CEOs, and Wall Street titans who are rigging the economy against them.

Much of the corporate media won’t tell this story. When Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic primary over Haley Stevens, the media overflowed with accounts of how much smaller El-Sayed’s margin of victory was than polls had predicted.

Yet the most remarkable thing about El-Sayed’s victory was that he won despite being dramatically outspent by super PACs arrayed against him.

Stevens benefited from tens of millions of dollars in outside spending, including the largest investment in a senatorial race ever made by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which traditionally supports pro-Israel candidates but in recent election cycles has supported candidates most favored by corporate America. AIPAC’s ads in favor of Stevens and against El-Sayed never even mentioned Israel.

Outside super PACs poured an estimated $54 million to $60 million into backing Stevens and opposing El-Sayed, compared to only about $5 million for El-Sayed. Pro-Stevens groups outspent El-Sayed on TV advertising alone by more than 12 to 1 ($26.9 million to $2.1 million) in the closing weeks. An average of $95 was spent for every vote against El-Sayed versus just $9 per vote for him.

The race between Stevens and El-Sayed was a proxy fight over the future of the Democratic Party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Stevens and encouraged donors to back her campaign, as did other corporate-aligned politicians such as Michigan senator Gary Peters. On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported El-Sayed, as did progressives such as Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren.

El-Sayed justifiably made a campaign issue out of how much corporate money was backing his rival. He argued that Democrats should reject corporate influence and embrace an agenda that helps average Americans. His campaign centered on providing Medicare for All, lowering prescription drug costs, and banning corporate PAC money. “We’re in a situation right now where the rich keep getting hyper-rich on the backs of figuring out how to monetize everyday people,” El-Sayed told AP during a Sunday afternoon march, as his supporters chanted behind him, “Money out of politics! Money in your pockets!”

El-Sayed’s victory marked a turning point for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

I saw the start of the corporate Democrats in the early 1980s, when Democrats in congress began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans, mostly from big corporations.

“Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not” crowed Democratic Rep. Tony Coelho, who then headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. They thought they could take advantage of their seemingly permanent power to raise cash for their campaigns.

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain as big corporations and Wall Street gained increasing influence in the party. It is a truism in politics as in nature: One dares not bite the hands that feed.

Corporate Democrats thereafter stopped the Democratic Party from pursuing an agenda that would have dramatically helped America’s working class.

To be sure, over the last three decades Democrats have scored some important victories for working families — the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

Yet they’ve done little to alter the widening economic inequalities that have taken a huge toll on working-class families.

Both Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free-trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or to enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down vote.

In his 1992 campaign, Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to buck corporate Democrats by spending political capital on it. In his 2008 campaign, Obama made the same promise but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Clinton was elected president to fewer than 10 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

The Obama administration also protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but left millions of underwater homeowners to drown.

Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger and major industries far more concentrated.

And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate monopoly power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.

John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president to depend on the votes of working-class Americans while losing the votes of white, college-educated Americans by 2 to 1. Sixty years later, Joe Biden depended on the votes of college-educated Americans while losing the votes of the white working class by 2 to 1. Kamala Harris lost the working class by an even larger margin.

Trump has exposed the venality and cupidity of corporate America, while large swaths of the working middle class struggle to make ends meet. As a result, Republicans appear likely to face some major defeats in the midterm elections. Corporate Democrats are on the defensive because their campaign cash isn’t working the way it used to.

Now, finally, the Democratic Party has an opportunity to once again become the party of working Americans, as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than the party of corporate America. It is more urgent than at any time since the Great Depression that Democrats act on this opportunity.

-=-=

---

AN 1 24 BUT REBOOT

Editor's note: *On the day after Trump's suprising victory over Hillary Clinton, we've resurfaced Robert Reich's killer essay explaining why the working class doesn't vote for Democrats anymore.

Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?

The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.

Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”

All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last 24 years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.

I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown.

Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown farlarger, and major industries more concentrated.

Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform?

You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.

Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.

In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes.

Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years.

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street.

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top.

This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.

But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.

---

grimm bk

we have ppl --> AOC

conversation with political analyst Ryan Grim on how big money took over the Democratic party and the struggle against it. The last thirty years has seen the building  of a movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning.  This movement is th e one that propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into office.

Guest: Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief. He is a contributor to the Young Turks Network and author of the book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.His latest book is We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-17-2019/

1976 carter kinda central, fix rep by post-prez

1978 newt g shellacking, longtime senators, lions like frank church, birch bayh

roger stone et al tactics, 1976 scotus camp fin reform [buckely valeo?], political consultant, pol ops, oppo, 30 sec ads TV, corp $ (TV and corp money // rose as factors together: we have opposite now, TV decline coupled with online small $ raising?))

dccc a backwater, tony c goes to corps and sez we have house 40 yrs(still have dixiecrats) so you need to fund us; win big in 1982? said to be b/c of Reagan recession, but grimm sez dem $ ctr; then dems pick Mondale, defiicit hawk, but was painted as liberal, landslide loss; dens say oh liberal is loser, so leads to clinton triangulation?

pelosi endorsed by widow, beat DSA britt pro gay cand (so when she says i understand the SF left, she means i have beaten them); she thinks usa basically conservative in RR era, so she still fears backlash cf clinton impeachment.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-26-2019/

https://inthesetimes.com/features/dccc_left_progressive_challengers_laura_moser_campaign_finance.html

april

no lnx

February, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) attempted to undermine Democratic primary candidate Laura Moser out of fear she’s too far left. The Houston journalist and activist is running in Texas’s 7th District on a platform of single payer, gun control and reproductive rights. In a move typically reserved for Republican opponents, the DCCC—whose mission is to fundraise for Democratic House candidates—posted opposition research it had conducted on Moser. Citing her recent move to Texas from Washington, D.C., and her campaign’s payments to her husband’s D.C. research firm, the memo portrayed her as corrupt and a carpetbagger.

Despite these attacks, Moser came in second in the primary, moving on to a May 22 runoff.

This could well be the year the Democrats take control of the House for the first time since 2010. Of the 90 seats the party is targeting for November, just 24 need to turn blue, a prospect made all the more exciting by the Bernie Sanders-inspired deluge of progressive candidates around the country. But the DCCC is emerging as that movement’s counterweight, if not downright enemy.

From the May 2018 issue

TURNING THE HOUSE PURPLE

The DCCC, chaired by Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), has teamed up with the House’s centrist Blue Dog caucus to recruit candidates for the 2018 elections, attempting to replicate the 2006 strategy of then-DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel. Democrats did win back the House in 2006 (arguably due as much to George W. Bush’s historic unpopularity as to Emanuel), but the influx of conservative Democrats contributed to a watering down of the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform, a shift to austerity, and, eventually, legislative stalemate.

That doesn’t seem to bother the DCCC.

The Committee’s recruits are heavily weighted toward military veterans and former national security officials. Elissa Slotkin, a DCCC-backed candidate in Michigan’s 8th District, worked for the CIA in Iraq under John Negroponte before moving to George W. Bush’s National Security Council and then Barack Obama’s State and Defense Departments. Slotkin was an architect of the failed “surge” strategy in Iraq and continues to claim it as a success. As recently as 2014, she praised Negroponte—whose claim to fame is covering up the atrocities committed by Reagan-supported right-wing forces in Central America.

The DCCC’s candidates also skew toward the well-heeled and well-connected. An heir to a liquor fortune, a millionaire philanthropist, a furniture company heir and former State Department official, the former executive of a shoe company once accused of labor abuses: All appear on the DCCC’s 2018 roster. Angie Craig, running in Minnesota’s 2nd District, was an executive of a powerful medical technology company and spent her time there funneling money to mostly Republicans.

In Nebraska’s 2nd District, the DCCC lent a hand to Brad Ashford—a former Republican who favors abortion restrictions—at the expense of his more progressive primary challenger Kara Eastman, who supports reproductive rights, Medicare for All and other progressive policies. Over in Virginia’s 2nd, the DCCC swung in early behind businesswoman Elaine Luria, a military veteran who twice voted for her Republican opponent, over Karen Mallard, a union member who supports a $15 minimum wage and universal healthcare.

DCCC officials and alumni have also reportedly stepped in to nudge progressive candidates out of several House races. In Colorado’s 6th, a Democratic-leaning swing district where Republican Rep. Mike Coffman is considered vulnerable, party officials are reportedly trying to clear the field for DCCC-trained former Army Ranger Jason Crow. Levi Tillemann, a progressive candidate whose campaign is managed by a Sanders 2016 alum, says he was asked in January by Minority Whip Steny Hoyer—a former DCCC official and major fundraiser—to exit the race because Democratic leaders had decided “very early on” to back Crow.

In Pennsylvania’s 7th District, the DCCC pressured out a progressive because they felt their pick would be a better fundraiser. In California’s 39th, it was to make way for a lottery-winning lifelong Republican who switched parties because he believes the Democrats are closer than the GOP to Reagan-era Republicanism.

The DCCC appears reluctant to support progressives even when they present the only opportunity to flip a red seat. Last year, the Committee largely stayed away from the special election for Montana’s at-large district, spending a mere $340,000 on populist Rob Quist’s surging campaign, compared to the millions it poured into centrist John Ossoff’s bid for Georgia’s 6th district.

In the April 2017 special election for Kansas’ ultraconservative 4th District after Mike Pompeo was tapped as Trump’s CIA director, progressive James Thompson was frustrated that the DCCC put its resources to work only at the last minute. Thompson still came within seven points of flipping the district. Yet Thompson, who’s running again this year, isn’t featured on the DCCC’s list of “Red to Blue” candidates to support—those running in Republican-held districts ripe to turn.

For all this electioneering, the DCCC’s hit rate hasn’t been stellar. In 2016, its preferred candidates lost 23 districts that Hillary Clinton won.

A LONG TRADITION

What explains the DCCC’s allergy to progressives? Part of the story lies in its history.

:{

}:

The 152-year-old organization has always been devoted to getting more Democrats elected, but its secondary mission has increasingly become the courting of wealth. As campaigns became more expensive with the advent of television, the DCCC began to alter its fundraising strategy from a single annual dinner to a year-round program with a full-time staff. In 1972, the Committee was used as a vehicle to funnel money to moderate Democrats from donors “opposing or cool” to George McGovern,as the Washington Post put it, but who didn’t want the donations to appear on their financial reports. These included BankPac (the American Bankers Association’s PAC) and the Mortgage Bankers PAC, among others.

Above: Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.) embraces Rep. Martin Olav Sabo (D-Minn.) in 1989. As DCCC chair from 1981-1989, Coelho greased the way for lobbyists to access Democrats—for a price. (Photo by Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

The DCCC’s first major scandal came not long after. Chair Ohio Rep. Wayne Hays was tasked in 1973 with leading campaign finance reform in the House, a “whopping conflict of interest,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer noted at the time. Hays was known to “donate” funds from the DCCC and elsewhere to Democratic friends, even when they faced no GOP challenger. As head of the House Administration Committee, he dragged his feet on campaign finance reform and fought off attempts to unseat him by, among other things, reminding freshmen Democrats about the campaign funds he controlled. Hays ultimately resigned in 1976 after a clerk alleged she had been hired to provide him sexual services on the taxpayers’ dime.

:{

}:

The chair of the DCCC from 1981 to 1989 was Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.),a fiscal conservative who endorsed the balanced budget constitutional amendment. Coelho raised mountains of cash by opening up the DCCC’s fundraising to defense contractors, oil producers, venture capitalists and other businesspeople that, as he put it, “the party kicked away in the 1970s.”Coelho resigned under an ethical cloud, but later served as an unpaid advisor to the Clinton administration, where he refused to publicly reveal his clients at his day job as an investment banker.

Under Coelho, hundreds of lobbyists and lawyers started attending the DCCC’s annual fundraising dinners. A brochure for Coelho’s “Speaker’s Club” promised members that, by donating thousands of dollars, they would be “assured courteous and direct access to” and “relaxed intimacy” with Democratic leaders and members of Congress. One anonymous liberal congressman complained to the Wall Street Journal, “Our butts are being peddled around town, a dollar at a time.”

In 1981, as representatives of the commodities industry embarked on a massive lobbying effort to prevent a clampdown on a tax avoidance scheme, Coelho told Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee that two of the industry reps were “friends of the Democratic Party, so don’t be too rough on them.”

Coelho eventually departed Congress, but the intertwining of Democratic politics and money interests never did. In 1991, Steven Soren, an Iowa Democrat, wrote in the Washington Post of his “appalling” experience as a congressional candidate, which, for him, embodied a worrying and “dramatic shift from participatory democracy to a highly centralized and manipulative system.”

:{

}:

At DCCC workshops in 1990, he explained, wide-eyed candidates-to-be were imparted advice like: “Money drives this town” (DCCC staff member Marty Stone), “You have to sell yourself in Washington first” (consultant Tom King) and “Raising campaign money from Washington PACs is much easier than from individuals because it’s a business relationship” (Nebraska Rep. Peter Hoagland). At one of the workshops, Rep. Beryl Anthony (D-Ark.), a former head of the DCCC, told corporate PAC representatives that they would be able to pick winners in the room that would “make your board of directors proud.”

BIG MONEY

Twenty-eight years later, little has changed.While the DCCC has seen a “Trump bump” in the form of a record surge of small-dollar donations for the 2018 election cycle, its model is still stuck in big-donor mode. As The Intercept reported, the DCCC routinely requires its candidates to be able to raise at least $250,000 from the contacts in their phones, thereby leaning toward well-connected, wealthier candidates who tend to sit on the party’s right.

The DCCC’s funding structure incentivizes candidates who can cough up—or pull in—big sums. Much of the DCCC’s purse is filled by the dues Democratic House members pay every election cycle. A spreadsheet leaked to Buzzfeed in 2014 detailed some of these dues: $450,000 to $800,000 for House leadership and $200,000 to $500,000 for committee members and chief deputy whips. As a 2017 report from Issue One, an ethics watchdog group, put it, these dues act as “committee taxes,” forcing lawmakers to fundraise if they want to sit on or chair powerful committees, and making fundraising skills—not experience or knowledge—the most important qualification.

“Because of this pressure for fundraising, members have to spend a whole lot of time dialing for dollars rather than legislating,” says Eric Heberlig, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

These dues, which the DCCC’s Senate counterpart doesn’t levy, were at first limited to top brass. Heberlig says this changed with the GOP’s first-in-40-years takeover of the House in 1994. “The party realized that if it got its incumbent members to chip in, they could take money from donors who had business before Congress and shift it to competitive districts.”

After legal limits were placed on “soft money” in 2002, the DCCC ratcheted dues up substantially. When Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson fell behind on his dues in 2004, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats warned him that he would be passed over for a ranking position on the House Agriculture Committee. He began raising increasing amounts from business PACs and large donors.

There’s also the influence of lobbyists. In 2017, the DCCC’s top five lobbying bundlers alone brought in more than $1.3 million. One was Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a progressive group. The other four—Steven Elmendorf, Vincent Roberti, David Thomas and Tony Podesta—count or have counted among their clients a dizzying line-up of corporate giants, including just about every major pharmaceutical company you can think of: Pfizer, Amgen, Sigma, Novartis.

Three of these lobbyists—Podesta, Thomas and Elmendorf—have previously represented the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry lobbying group that fiercely fights attempts to lower drug prices.

Such fundraising comes with access. A document leaked by one of the suspected Russian hackers in 2016 showed lobbyists for Goldman Sachs and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association—whose PACs had donated to the DCCC—complaining to DCCC chair Ben Ray Luján about “messaging demonizing Wall Street” and the influence of Elizabeth Warren. Luján reassured them that Warren didn’t speak for the party.

Perhaps the influence of Big Pharma donors helps explain why a DCCC-commissioned report leaked in February discouraged House members from campaigning on Medicare for All—the policy that most distinguishes progressive challengers from the DCCC’s centrist picks.

MONEY OVER POWER

Sanders has expressed disgust at the DCCC’s recent efforts to stomp out progressive challengers. He told The Hill in March, “That just continues the process of debasing the democratic system in this country and is why so many people are disgusted with politics.” He called the organization’s attacks on Moser in Texas “appalling” and “unacceptable.”

At a critical time for the Democratic Party to start winning, the establishment appears content to follow the same blueprint that left the party in electoral shambles. Then again, challenging the status quo and advancing a progressive agenda have never been the business of the DCCC, so long as the money keeps flowing.

BRANKO MARCETIC is an editorial assistant at Jacobin magazine and a regular contributor to In These Times. He hails from Auckland, New Zealand.

"CLEAN" MONEY

see also

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/polibig/eastbusi.htm

October 1986

The Business of Politics

Representative Tony Coelho has raised a lot of money for congressional Democrats -- and roused a lot of debate

by Gregg Easterbrook

:{

Although the decade began badly for the Democrats, the party's low point did not come in November of 1980, when the Republicans won the presidency and the Senate. It came the following spring,}: when Democrats in the House, the party's sole remaining stronghold, engaged Republicans in a contest to see which side could chop more business loopholes in the 1981 tax-cut legislation. Democrats hoped to win back the hearts -- and open the pocketbooks -- of businessmen, who in 1980 had overwhelmingly supported Republicans. But the Republicans kept matching and raising the Democrats in the tax-sweeteners game. The final version of the legislation was a bonanza for business that reduced federal revenues even more than the Administration had planned -- and, parenthetically, thereby encouraged our current mega-deficits. Still, despite this ardent wooing, business remained Republican in its giving habits. That was what made the tax debate of 1981 the Democrats' low point. The party tried to sell its soul and failed.

Commentators, noting President Reagan's popularity, the mood swing of the electorate, and the outpouring of conservative money, proclaimed in 1981 that the much prophesied "realignment" -- the Republicans' ascent to majority-party status -- was finally at hand. The Democratic camp stood in even worse disorder than usual, with a little-known Los Angeles lawyer, Charles Manatt, taking over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the utterly anonymous Tony Coelho, a thirty-nine year-old California congressman with no organizational experience, assuming leadership of the related Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is charged with raising money for Democratic congressmen. Twenty-five more seats in 1982 would have given the Republicans the House, and with it full control over federal decision-making. The conventional wisdom held that the Democratic Party would not get out of the Reagan revolution alive.

Needless to say, the conventional wisdom was wrong. The Democrats kept the House, and they stand a chance of recovering the Senate in next month's election. Meanwhile the party's fund-raising for itself (there are several other types of fund raising, including the kind candidates do for themselves) has become dramatically more effective. For the 1980 elections the DCCC raised $1.8 million, while its counterpart, the National Republican Campaign Committee, took in more than ten times as much. For the 1986 elections the DCCC expects to take in at least $15 million, around half the amount the NRCC will raise. Though the Republicans retain the lead in most forms of money-raising, it is an ever more modest one.

Most of the Democrats' gains stem from business gifts and direct-mail appeals -- exactly what powers Republican fund-raising. The gains have occurred as Coelho (pronounced Quell-o) has thrown himself into campaign finance with the kind of zealous stamina last seen when W. Clement Stone built a pecuniary empire by selling insurance door-to-door. A man of unusual drive and almost pious determination, Coelho has since 1981 tirelessly canvassed the country, spending 150 days a year on the road, many of them devoted to extracting contributions from businessmen and political-action-committee (PAC) managers.

It is commonly assumed that the reason for the increase in financial support for right-wing candidates over the past decade is that businessmen are all Republicans. Certainly, a high proportion of chief executive officers and of the rich are Republicans, but most business men and women are neither CEOs nor rich. Even in the Reagan era many mid-level managers and independent businessmen and a few CEOs remain Democrats, either because of upbringing or because of a preference for Democratic policies. Yet in the years building up to their 1980 defeat the Democrats seemed to write off the business community. Many businesses and PACs were simply never called on by Democratic fund-raisers.

Voters think of PACs as institutions that exist to seduce congressmen. But the system also works the other way around. Nearly all Washington dinners held "in honor" of some senator or committee chairman, for instance, are actually arranged by the honoree or a close affiliate and are attended mainly by lobbyists and PAC officials whose invitations apprised them of the $250 or $500 "donation" required at the door. Just as PACs have been able to render congressmen timorous by implicitly threatening to back an opponent, congressmen have learned to shake down the PACs with a reciprocal insinuation that they'd better give or lose ground to a competing PAC that did. Today it's probably more common for politicians to put the touch on PACs than vice versa. The Republicans have seemed to understand the possibilities since PACs began to proliferate in 1974; the Democrats have come to understand them through Tony Coelho.

James Devlin, a Texas businessman, recalls meeting Coelho in 1981. Then the chairman of U.S. Telephone Inc., Devlin was in Washington to lobby congressmen about phone deregulation. While he was waiting to meet someone for breakfast in the House dining room, Coelho walked up to Devlin cold and started giving him a sales pitch on the Speaker's Club, a new group Coelho was forming.

"Clubs" were just catching on in political circles as a polite way to combine arm twisting and elbow rubbing. Coelho's club, a bargain at $5,000, promised audiences with Speaker Tip O'Neill and other Democratic big wheels. "Tony had these little index cards he was writing on, and before I knew it, he was saying, 'I'll just put you down for $5,000,'" Devlin says. "Suddenly I felt myself in the presence of a businessman." Coelho, Devlin says, "has a style that's engaging to business people. Tony's a guy who makes lists, who summarizes, who gets to the point quickly and then moves on to the next item."

Devlin became one of Coelho's first converts. Soon Coelho was urging O'Neill, who rarely travels, to go to Dallas for a fund-raiser. Devlin had organized a party at the home of Starke Taylor, an old-money patrician and now the mayor of Dallas. "The majority of the guests were Republicans who had never had contact with Democratic leadership," Devlin explained. "I think Starke Taylor's wife wanted to keep it secret from her friends that Tip O'Neill was going to set foot in her home. Picture the setting. A palatial Dallas home, a string orchestra performing, Texas Republicans in evening clothes -- plus Tip O'Neill. And he charmed them, absolutely charmed them."

The party raised $125,000 for the DCCC. Devlin thinks it represented a turning point in Coelho's evolving understanding of businessmen. "Tony visualized that businessmen are businessmen, not ideologists," Devlin says. "Businessmen are interested in results." If Coelho could provide results -- whether consideration for legislative proposals or introductions to the right people or simply the assurance that donations weren't being squandered -- business PACs would be happy to invest a little to cover their Democratic bases.

"There's a lot of ideology out there, but what drives business is pragmatism," explains Walter Shorenstein, a San Francisco developer and Democratic donor. "I say to my Republican friends in business, 'When was the last time you had your Democratic congressman out to your golf club?' The ones who do are always quite glad they did."

Coelho admits, with a frankness that has won him a minor celebrity status among political cognoscenti, that in the dark days following the 1980 elections his appeal to donors was, as Robert Kuttner reported in The New Republic, "Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not. I tell them, 'You're going to need to work with us.'"

If that pitch sounds like a mixture of protection racket (nice little multinational you have here; too bad if anything should happen to it) and an offer to play ball, that's exactly how it was intended to sound. Political fund-raising appeals often boil down to this formula, though fund-raisers prefer lofty phrases about national purpose. In the period following Reagan's election the most persuasive argument Democrats could make to business leaders with conservative sympathies was that it would be more cost-effective to buy Democratic good will than to try to wipe out the party altogether. Democrats still had incumbency on their side in the House, and going after dozens of them would be a very different matter from going after one President or a few senators.

"The thing to do with business men and women is to appeal to their business sense," Coelho told me recently. "You can't sell them H. R. 1236. You can't sell them a legislative program. People aren't interested in that. Business men and women want to be associated with success. If they see you are going to be successful, they latch on to you. I basically went out and said, 'I'm an entrepreneur in politics. I'm going to get the Democratic Party into direct mail, media centers, computers'" Coelho continued. "I went to Texas and California. Where are the entrepreneurs in this country? The big numbers are in those states. I went to New York and later Florida, as well, but Texas and California the most. Some people will say that was where to find oil and gas money or conservative money. But I was going after a mentality. It's just like anybody else who starts a new business. Where do they find people who will invest in them? Among the entrepreneurs.

"What I wanted was to make the DCCC like a business. What I have now is a business that is successful. My business had no assets, and today has five million dollars in assets. My business had no income, and today we open up our doors every month and get three hundred thousand dollars in direct mail. The business of politics is what I'm all about."

In the campaign-finance business it is donors who are the customers, and what keeps the customers satisfied is access. Access in the Washington subculture has more to do with personal courtesy and attention than with "power" -- since even access to the President does not guarantee that you will get your way -- and so, more than votes, the products that fund-raisers sell are connections and ego strokes. Thomas Gaubert, a Dallas venture capitalist, says, "I'm one of the biggest contributors to the Governor of Texas, but can I get him on the telephone? Hell, no. Sometimes it takes a week. I call Tony any hour of the day or night and he gets back to me immediately. Some days he just calls to ask how I'm doing. That pleases me tremendously."

Coelho tripled the take from DCCC fund-raising, from $2 million to $6 million, in his first two years. Among his first management decisions was to insist that during the 1982 elections DCCC funds be used selectively: test-marketed, as it were. Previously the committee had handed out a set amount, usually a thousand dollars, to every Democratic candidate regardless of need. This was both an attempt to avoid intramural bickering and an admission that the committee had no larger blueprint. Coelho decided to ignore those Democrats with "safe" seats and concentrate resources on close races.

Many in the party old guard were furious. Senior incumbents who had served faithfully found themselves rewarded with no party funds; green or little-known candidates got the legal maximum of $50,000 in intra-party help. It was a controversial decision, and Coelho took the heat for it -- "I still have enemies in Congress because of it," he says -- though the party leadership had privately concurred, reckoning that if the stratagem failed, the young and expendable Coelho would make a handy fall guy.

When the stratagem succeeded, with the Democrats picking up twenty-six House seats during the height of the Reagan revolution, Coelho was able to claim a share of the credit.Just a few months later, in the winter of 1983, he threatened to quit as the DCCC head if he wasn't given a role in party policymaking. Coelho was in a position strong enough that he won this concession, although the DCCC chair had traditionally been strictly a money post, divorced from the issues. Soon word began to circulate that when O'Neill retired, Coelho would run for whip, the number three position in the House leadership and a proven stepping-stone to the speaker's chair. O'Neill will retire in 1987, and Coelho is at this writing considered the favorite for whip. If he wins, it will be after just eight years in Congress, an amazingly short tenure.

Another businesslike decision Coelho made early on was to invest a portion of the DCCC's rapidly increasing income. Previously, the money had immediately gone out to finance campaigns or to retire old debts; some of these venerable obligations date to the days of the Humphrey-Nixon race. Coelho set aside about $3.5 million of the first $6 million he raised to finance a media center and a direct-mail operation; at the DNC, Charles Manatt was doing much the same.

"In 1981 the average Democratic House contribution was about five hundred dollars, while the comparable Republican average was thirty-eight dollars," Coelho said. "That told me very quickly something was wrong. Here we were the party of the little guy, yet the small contributors were going Republican." By 1986 Democratic direct mail had recovered. Coelho could boast that the DCCC's average contribution was "down" to $35, with small contributors providing nearly half of the committee's take. (Different schools of thought exist on the ultimate value of direct mail as a fund-raising technique. Overhead is high, anywhere from 20 percent to 90 percent; the overhead involved in soliciting a PAC contribution, usually $30 or $40 for steak, shrimp, and drinks, consumes a much smaller proportion of the gift. The impact of direct mail appeals in general has declined as the practice proliferates and people's mailboxes fill up with unwanted and unread mail. What fund-raisers continue to like about direct mail is that it can be operated on an automated basis. No traveling, personal appearances, or handshaking is required.)

Meanwhile the DCCC, at Coelho's behest, was building his media center. Here he was playing catch-up; the Republicans, many of whom have backgrounds in marketing, had caught on much sooner to the importance of controlling the means of video production.

As early as 1981 the Republican committee was transmitting "satellite press releases" -- flattering clips of a senator or a representative that are beamed out at comparatively little expense for any local television station to use as if the station had reported the story itself. Republican officials were sending camera crews to "cover" congressional activity in such a way that their clients appeared to be at the center of the action: artful filming can transform routine questioning during a routine hearing into a face-to-face showdown between a congressman and a famous witness.

Coelho, who has six television sets in his office -- in addition to C-SPAN, he watches NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and PBS news shows simultaneously, scanning for pictures with political content -- preached to the Democrats the value of media and of packaging ideas, and they began to listen. "Politics has become the business of communication," he says. "If I make a sale, they react by voting for us. I still think you ought to do what is legislatively right, but the way you package your idea has become just as important."

Coelho was instrumental in fashioning Tip O'Neill into a visible media counterpoint to Ronald Reagan. O'Neill had long been uncomfortable before the camera, and no previous speaker of the House had had any standing on TV. O'Neill's predecessors in the electronic age -- Carl Albert, John McCormack, Sam Rayburn, and Joseph W. Martin -- were confirmed behind-the-scenes operators.

One of Coelho's first acts at the DCCC was to hire Chris Matthews, a young political operative with a keen understanding of television's need to reduce issues to pictures and single sentences. Coelho pushed O'Neill to take Matthews as his press secretary;Matthews, who is well liked by the Washington press corps because of his ready wit, had soon sweet-talked the networks into treating the Speaker as if he were an opposition leader in the Philippines or Nicaragua, so that sundry evening-news clips of Reagan were followed by ten-second retorts from O'Neill.

By the time Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address rolled around, Coelho had helped persuade O'Neill to film his response on the streets of Boston, talking to average voters. (But, as Barbara Matusow reported in the Washington Journalism Review, it snowed the day of the address, and O'Neill was unable to get a flight north. So the DCCC media center set up fake Boston scenes in Washington, complete, in the finest packaging tradition, with fake real people. One "typical Boston" scene, Matusow wrote, was filmed on Capitol Hill in a bar that is a hangout for congressional staffers. Cameramen had to shoot carefully around Washington Redskins posters.) Polls show that 90 percent of Americans now recognize O'Neill's name and give him approval ratings nearly as high as Reagan's. That O'Neill, the speaker of the junior chamber of Congress and a man without presidential possibilities, was able to emerge as the Democrats' leading figure when several senators and governors were competing for the distinction is a testament to the DCCC's studious exploitation of television.

Coelho has further preached to Democrats the value of "free media": rather than pay for ads,get the networks to broadcast the message voluntarily. He is especially proud of a free-media coup that took place when the DCCC held a press conference, in March of 1984, announcing an advertising campaign to embarrass Reagan on the "sleaze issue." The event was given prominent play on the evening news; the three major networks ran excerpts from tapes of the coming ad which Coelho had distributed. The ad itself never ran -- network coverage had been the goal all along.

"Our sleaze ad cost about $800 to produce, and we got a million dollars worth of publicity from it, because we put it out in a way the media could use," Coelho says. "Video media has to deal with what the picture is. Reagan understands this to perfection. If you control the picture, you in effect control how the video media presents your issues. It's totally different from the printed word."

Another example followed the first presidential debate in 1984. Coelho was shown on many national newscasts saying that the President had "looked old and acted old," a thought the Mondale camp wanted to plant but could not, for obvious reasons, let Mondale himself say. Viewers got the impression this was Coelho's spontaneous reaction to a news event and that cameramen just happened to be nearby. In fact Coelho had informed Mondale advisers that he would deliver the comment and had refined the phrasing to make it as short and punchy as possible. (Later, after the Mondale ship began to sink, Coelho distanced Democratic congressional candidates from their party's presidential ticket -- for which he was criticized in the press, though not by his fellow congressmen.)

Coelho probably could not have gotten the DCCC job in 1980 unless few others had wanted it. Not only was the party in decline but the past two DCCC chairmen, Wayne Hays and James Corman, had not been success stories. Hays, of course, was finished the day his aide Elizabeth Ray admitted, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone." Corman, a twenty-year House veteran from Los Angeles, lost in 1980 by 752 votes when Jimmy Carter conceded defeat while the California polls were still open, causing an exodus of Democrats waiting in line at polling places.

But Coelho, a student of congressional history, knew that earlier DCCC chairmen had included Tip O'Neill and Lyndon Johnson. The job allows a congressman to woo his fellow party members with financial support. This is a powerful, although imperfect, tool of self-advancement -- imperfect at present because Coelho continues to take money from backers in the districts of safe-seat congressmen and shift it to candidates whose districts don't produce contributions, and these transactions cause only headaches for him. In the 1986 election, for example, Coelho is "maxing out" on intraparty contributions to several close North Carolina races -- essentially shifting money from Texas, California, and New York to North Carolina -- although the state's delegation is not expected to support Coelho in his bid for whip.

The DCCC job is also renowned for allowing its holder to make the acquaintance of benefactors who might later support his own ambitions. Coelho's ambitions are a subject of considerable interest within party circles. He first won the notice of Democratic leaders in 1979, when, in his first term in the House, he sold $50,000 worth of tickets to the party's annual dinner. Most congressmen considered this duty on a par with having to unload 4-H raffle tickets; a single $1,000 sale was all that was expected of anyone.

Born to a lower-middle-class dairy-farm family in the Central Valley of California in 1942, Coelho while still a child distinguished himself as a demonic worker even by the standards of an enterprise in which a continuous tending of animals is the norm. He and his brother sometimes rose as early as 2:30 A.M. to milk cows before heading off to school. The family worshipped Franklin Roosevelt, whom they considered the savior of small agriculture. In high school and later at Loyola University of Los Angeles, a Catholic men's college, Coelho did very well both academically and socially. He planned to enter law school.

In 1963 his father's farm went bankrupt, an event that Coelho -- with a Reaganesque time sense -- blames on "Republican policies." Then, just before graduation from Loyola, Coelho decided that he wanted to become a Jesuit priest. Though it was 1964, the first big Vietnam draft year, Coelho says his decision to enter the seminary was triggered by the death of John Kennedy.

"I loved everything about Kennedy," Coelho says. "I wouldn't go out on a date if he was going to be on TV. I loved the way he sold himself and his ideas. I loved his young family and the way he involved them. I didn't know much about what he stood for, but I loved the charisma of the guy." His memory of the day Kennedy was shot is still vivid: "I had to announce that he had been assassinated. We had a ceremony in the campus chapel. The church was packed. There were people out on the steps and all over the grounds kneeling and praying that he would survive the bullet. I couldn't believe they would take him away."

As he prepared to enter studies for the Jesuit order, Coelho, who had suffered from convulsions for years, was diagnosed as having epilepsy. His parents, both of Portuguese descent, clung to a superstition that epilepsy is divine punishment for an ancestor's sin. "Their reaction hurt me -- they said no son of theirs was an epileptic." Another shock came when the Jesuits informed him that he could no longer join the priesthood, invoking a canon dating to the Middle Ages that forbade the ordination of epileptics.

"I went into the gutter," Coelho says. "I was suicidal. I learned what it is to be discriminated against."

His period in the gutter didn't last long. Within a few months of discovering his epilepsy he had a job working for -- of all people -- Bob Hope. Hope's wife, an active Catholic and a supporter of Loyola University, had heard about Coelho's misfortune.

Hope told Coelho that if he wanted to help people but couldn't be a priest, he should work for a congressman. Coelho wrote to his hometown representative, B. F. Sisk, and in 1965 was on his way to Washington, where he rose to be the congressman's top aide. Because of Sisk's committee assignment, Coelho soon found himself in charge of a potent instrument for making early insider connections -- he controlled the allocation of Capitol Hill parking places.

Sisk retired in 1978, and Coelho ran for his seat. When an opponent tried to make epilepsy an issue by saying that Coelho might embarrass the district by having a seizure during a visit to the White House, Coelho replied, "A lot of people have gone to the White House and had fits. At least I'd have an excuse." Reagan himself couldn't have made a better comeback. In 1964 a benign tumor was surgically removed from Coelho's brainstem. His seizures have diminished, and he now controls the condition with daily medication. He is active in several epilepsy awareness campaigns.

Coelho makes considerable hay of his Portuguese ancestry, frequently describing himself as "very Portuguese and very ethnic," though he was born in the United States to American parents and his appearance is typically middle American. In 1985 Coelho fought a minor political struggle to be admitted to membership in the House Hispanic caucus. "True" Hispanic members resisted, but their position was not helped by the fact that the chairman of the caucus, Representative Edward Roybal, was himself born in the United States to American parents.

As Coelho's influence with party policy-makers has increased, he has become increasingly concerned that, as he says, "there's a perception I can't do substance." The party left complains that Coelho must be a closet conservative or he couldn't get along so well with the businessmen he lobbies. His voting record, though, is mainly liberal. Coelho says that he was instrumental in persuading Majority Leader Jim Wright, of Texas, Whip Thomas Foley, of Washington, and Democratic leading light Richard Gephardt, of Missouri, to fight deployment of the MX missile. He also helped draw up the party's position paper on the 1985 Geneva summit meeting. Recently Coelho has begun to be quoted as a party spokesman -- on trade, aid to the contra rebels, agriculture, nuclear-reactor safety, and a range of other issues.

Because Coelho has no compunctions about fund-raising -- "Money is part of politics and always will be," he often says -- and does it so well, if he were a Republican he would be one of the party's darlings. Many Democrats, however, are uneasy about him.

Off the record, some Democrats maintain that Coelho is bartering away the party's populist birthright. On the record, Kuttner has called him "the Milo Minderbinder of campaign finance, with something to sell just about everybody." Thomas Edsall, a congressional reporter for The Washington Post and the author of The New Politics of Inequality, which argues that money and legislative fairness are mutually exclusive, says that Coelho "epitomizes a central tension within the beleaguered Democratic Party -- between the party's reform wing that frowns on the campaign finance world of special-interest PACs and the party's deep thirst for money." Fred Wertheimer, the president of Common Cause, has called it "institutional schizophrenia" for Democrats to rely on business funds. There is, as well, schizophrenia within the business community that funds the Democrats, as was demonstrated when Coelho brought conservative oil-drillers and liberal Jewish financiers together into the Council for a Secure America, a money conduit whose participants were united only in their anxiety about the Arabs.

But if business funding is said to be bad for the Democratic Party now, five years ago the lack of it was said to be bad for the party too. And the phenomenon is hardly confined to Coelho's DCCC. Of the top twenty-five contributors to the re-election campaign of New York Governor Mario Cuomo, the paladin of orthodox liberalism, eighteen are business interests.

The political distinction between money accepted without strings and money taken in trade can be as difficult to judge as the biblical distinction between money itself (neutral) and the love of money (root of evil). If the new Democratic fund-raising efforts are minted, the evidence would be votes in Congress. So has the Democratic Party become more pro-business since Coelho took over the DCCC?

The answer is a mild yes. But given the sentiments of the electorate and the general concern over the economy, it's hard to believe that Democrats wouldn't have grown more pro-business even if they had not received a dime from the halls of commerce. Party positions in the House do not reflect anything like the extreme rightward shift that might be expected if business support -- of the cliched conservative, big-business kind -- were truly corrupting Democratic thinking. Tax reform legislation, for example, will effectively raise corporate taxes; Democrats have resisted the Reagan Administration's attempts to lessen environmental enforcement; and so on. Most House Democrats (including Coelho) voted for the nuclear freeze, hardly an item high on corporate America's agenda.

Much of the animosity against Coelho seems to stem from apprehension over hearing him speak candidly about political money and media, rather than in the euphemisms that institutional Washington prefers. Coelho openly states political facts of life that Democrats, among others, know to be true but fear to do anything about -- by, for example enacting serious campaign reforms. One such reform, championed by Senator David Boren, of Oklahoma, would cap the total amount of contributions a congressional candidate could accept. This approach sidesteps the vexing First Amendment issue of money as speech, because individuals would still be able to give while politicians would be rescued from the arms-race-like imperative to build up ever bigger war chests. Hardly anybody professes to like the current system of campaign financing; even Coelho is uneasy with it. He recently told The Wall Street Journal, "The system at times forces Congressmen to do things that they would rather not do. I think that the process buys you out. But I don't think that you individually ... sell out. There is a big difference." Most congressmen would probably agree, and then shrug their shoulders, as if nothing could be done about this quandary. But "the process" that "buys you out" is not a law of nature; neither is it mandated by the Constitution. It is an invention of Congress and within the power of Congress to change.

wiki

Anthony Lee "Tony" Coelho (born June 15, 1942) is a former United States congressman from California, and primary sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act. He is a former chairman, and current member of the Epilepsy Foundation's national board of directors.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Education and early career
• 2 Early political career
• 3 Congressional career and politics
• 4 Life after Congress
• 5 External links
• 6 References

Education and early career

Coelho was born in rural Los Banos,California, to parents of Portuguese descent,^[1][2] attended public schools in nearby Dos Palos, and grew up working on his family’s dairy farm. At age 15, Coelho was injured in a pickup truck accident, which doctors later suggested was the precipitating event for the onset of his epilepsy. For years after the accident, Coelho did not know he had the illness.

Coelho graduated with a B.A. from Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1964. At Loyola, he was initiated as a brother in Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity and a member of the prestigious Crimson Circle, and later was elected Student Body President during his senior year.

After the Kennedy assassination, Coelho decided to become a priest.^[3] He went to a doctor for a medical exam, a prerequisite for entering into the seminary. The doctor informed him that he had epilepsy. Because of canon law, he was unable to become a priest. Once the diagnosis was reported to the state, Coelho lost both his driver's license and his health insurance.

Early political career

Coelho worked as a staff member for Congressman Bernie Sisk from 1965 until 1978. By 1970, Coelho was serving as Sisk’s administrative assistant. He enhanced his expertise in agriculture policy as staff director for the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Cotton. As staff coordinator for the House Rules Subcommittee on Broadcasting, on which Sisk served, Coelho helped develop the procedures that made possible the television coverage of the House proceedings via C-SPAN. When Sisk retired, Coelho ran for his seat and won. WESTLANDS

During his first campaign for Congress, Coelho’s opponent asked how people would feel if Coelho went to a meeting at the White House and had a seizure. “The press called me and the good Lord was with me,” Coelho later related. “Off the top of my head I said, ‘Well, in the 13 years I have served in Washington I knew a lot of people who went to the White House and had fits. At least I’d have an excuse.”^[4]

Congressional career and politics

In November 1978, Coelho was elected as a Democrat to the 96th Congress. He was later elected to the five succeeding Congresses where he served until his resignation on June 15, 1989. He served on the Agriculture, Interior, Veterans Affairs, and Administration Committees during his tenure, but he specialized in disabled rights.

:{

As a member of the House leadership, Coelho helped lead the effort to pin the political blame for enactment of the Reagan economic program on the Republicans in the House. One Democratic campaign advertisement, airing early in the 1982 election season, featured scissors cutting a Social Security card and a voice accusing Republicans of trying to cut benefits.^[6]}:In 1980, Coelho was named chairman of what is often called in Washington, “The D Triple C (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee).” As the Washington Postobserved, “They made the sophomore congressman from central California, their chief House fund-raiser, a position not bestowed on such a junior member since it was given to a young Texas congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson in 1940.”^[5]

In 1986, Coelho was elected House Majority Whip. As the chief vote counter for his party, Coelho oversaw a series of Democratic victories in the House on measures ranging from the budget to cutting off funds for the war in Central America.

In 1989, Coelho resigned from the House after six terms in the wake of press reports that he had received a loan from a savings and loan executive to purchase junk bonds. He was not charged with any crime.^[7]

While in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.^[8]

Coelho was credited by Congressional colleagues as the primary sponsor^[9] of the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. By 1994, four years after the law's passage, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that some 800,000 more people with severe disabilities had found employment than were employed when the ADA was first enacted.^[10]

Life after Congress

In the nearly two decades since his retirement from Congress, Coelho has pursued careers in business and public service, while remaining active in the disabilities community.

After leaving Congress, he joined Wertheim Schroder & Company, an investment firm, as a managing director.

From 1990 to 1995, he also served as president and CEO of Wertheim Schroder Investment Services, which grew from $400 million to $4 billion in managed investments under his management.^[11]

In 1995, Coelho formed ETC w/tci, an education and training technology company in Washington, DC. He was the chairman and chief executive officer until 1997.

President Bill Clinton appointed Coelho to serve as Chairman of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, a position he held from 1994 to 2001; he also served as Vice Chair of the National Task Force on Employment of Adults with Disabilities. In 1998, Clinton appointed Coelho as the United States Commissioner General at the 1998 World Expo in Portugal. Clinton also appointed Coelho as Co-Chair to the U.S. Census Monitoring Board, a position he held until his appointment as general chairman of the Gore Presidential campaign.

In the summer of 1994, Coelho was the principal Democratic political strategist during the run-up to the mid-term Congressional elections. Officially, he was Senior Advisor to the Democratic National Committee. The Republican Party won a landslide victory in the fall congressional elections, capturing both the House and Senate by commanding margins.

On November 29, 1994, then-Speaker of the House Tom Foley appointed Coelho as one of 17 members of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. Congress created the commission to study what intelligence agencies should do after the Cold War, and was charged with preparing a report of its findings and recommendations to the President and the Congress.

In 1999, Coelho was made Chairman of Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign. During his tenure, Coelho moved the campaign headquarters from Washington, DC to Nashville, Tennessee. He oversaw an overhaul of the campaign’s message and strategy, and changed personnel and consultants. Gore prevailed over former Senator Bill Bradley in the Democratic primaries of 2000 in every primary and caucus contest and received the Democratic nomination to be president.

Before the 2000 Democratic Convention, Coelho became ill and resigned his position as General Campaign Chairman. Doctors later found and removed a tumor on the left side of his brain. He was replaced by former Commerce Secretary William Daley.

Coelho now lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He participates annually at New York Law School for its Tony Coelho Lecture in Disability Employment Law & Policy. He has endowed a chair in Public Policy at theUniversity of California in Merced. He is the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Epilepsy Foundation. He is a former chairman and current member of the Board of Directors of the American Association of People With Disabilities. He also sits on the Council on American Politics, the advisory board of George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management.^[12] Coelho also serves as an advisor ofZeniMax Media.^[13] Coelho also serves as a founding partner of Vectis Strategies, a national public affairs firm.

External links

• Tony Coelho at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• New York Law School
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• Facts about the Americans with Disabilities Act
• Library of Congress Biographical Dictionary
• Epilepsy Foundation of America
• Hispanic Americans in Congress
• The Council on American Politics at GW's Graduate School of Political Management

==

B. The Democrats’ Response: Mixing Business with Politics

The disparities between the Republican and Democratic Parties’ respective

fund-raising capabilities began to change when Tony Coelho, a little-known

congressman from California, became head of the DCCC in 1981.38 Over the

course of the previous decade, the political power of business and labor had

grown dramatically.39 Recognizing this growth, as well as the fund-raising gap

between the parties, Coelho set out to turn the DCCC into an effective fundraising

business, modeled after its Republican counterpart.40

He did so as the growth of PACs accelerated, both in number and influence,

reflecting a backlash against the political victories of consumer and

environmental interests in the 1970s.41 Although PACs had been around since

1944, their growth took off after the Nixon administration.42 Capitalizing on

Democratic control of the House in 1981, Coelho targeted PAC managers and

ruthlessly traded political access for cash.43 During his first year as chairman,

Coelho started the Speaker’s Club, a group that received audiences with

members—including House Speaker Tip O’Neill and other influential

Democrats—in exchange for a $5,000 membership fee.44 Despite Coelho’s

efforts and the fact that PACs typically give to incumbents, business PAC

money began to increasingly flow toward Republican candidates when it

appeared as though the Republican Party might regain control of the House in

1982.45

Instead in the 1982 elections, the economy soured and Republicans lost

twenty-six seats in the House.46 When the Democrats retained, and actually

increased, their majority in the House, Coelho stepped up his efforts to reclaim

business donations by convincing business and labor PAC leaders that

supporting incumbency yielded better political returns than supporting

candidates based on ideology.47 An emboldened Coelho “stressed over and

over” to business PACs that “Democrats retained a commanding majority in

the House and that the committees important to business continued to be

headed by Democrats.”48

His aggressive tactics in wooing business PACs away from the Republican

Party were compared to a Tammany Hall-style shakedown.49 As one account

relates:

Coelho set up candidate forums at which PAC directors could

look over the party’s prospects. Lobbyists and candidates all milled

around in a big room wearing name tags . . . .

Coelho didn’t rely wholly on the supposed business credentials of

his candidates, however. He announced he would record names of

those who didn’t support candidates he deemed worthy. It was as

though a traffic cop were stopping cars to sell tickets to the policeunion

ball.50

By 1983, just two years after Coelho was appointed DCCC chairman, the

Committee tripled its fund-raising from $2 million to $6 million.51 The

sources of the funds were highly concentrated:

Coelho liked to boast that half his money came through the mail,

from small donations with no strings attached. In gross terms, that

was true. But [finance director Terry] McAuliffe’s numbers show

==

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tony-Coelho-s-life-after-Congress-3065614.php

...

46, Coelho was the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives. High on the leadership ladder, he might, even with the bad publicity, have nudged himself up to the next rung, majority leader.

But he would have paid hell for doing so. So would his family. So would his Democratic Party colleagues already suffering that year from the slow-but-sure political roasting of Speaker Jim Wright.

Foreseeing a full-scale feeding frenzy, Coelho announced that he would leave the House on his next birthday. Rather than a desperate clinging to office, a death ritual he'd watched too often from too close range, he chose a mode of departure many would call graceful, even gallant. The man from California's agricultural Central Valley would take himself out to political pasture....

==

uc merced

After leaving Congress, Coelho has maintained his commitment to public service while building a successful career in private business. In 1989, he joined the New York-based investment firm of Wertheim Schroder & Company, Inc. as a managing director. He also was appointed as president and chief executive officer of Wertheim Schroder Investment Services. In 1995, Coelho left to form ETC w/tci, an education and training technology company in Washington, D.C., working in the capacity of chairman and chief executive officer until 1997.

His current business affiliations include positions on such public and private corporate boards as BestHalf.com; ColumbusNewport, L.L.C.; Cadiz, Inc.; Cyberonics, Inc.; DeFrancesco & Sons, Inc.; Fairfax Partners, L.L.C.; Kistler Aerospace Corporation; Ripplewood Holdings, L.L.C.; and Service Corporation International. Coelho also serves on the International Advisory Board of Fleishman Hillard, Inc.

==

But as the week went on, the shadow cast over Betty Wright's work extended its penumbra of doubt over other working spouses. Stories appeared about elected wives and employed husbands; lists were made of men who work on Capitol Hill and wives who work in Capital City. They made employment sound suspect.

"Suddenly," agrees Democratic consultant Ann Lewis, "the burden of proof has been put on a whole group of working wives to prove you are worth your pay." To show they are (1) actually working, (2) hired and paid for their own talents and (3) working in fields that don't conflict with government.

Among those who find this ethical desk-check demeaning and infuriating is Phyllis Coelho, who has worked for Rep. Andrew Jacobs (D., Ind.) before and since her marriage to House Whip Tony Coelho (D., Calif.). "If I were coming to town now, I'd really be nervous," she said. "What can you do? I'm not sure there's a job in this town someone couldn't make a problem out of."

==

Last year, as California endured one of its driest years on record, the Westlands Water District made it rain 3,000 miles away -- on Capitol Hill.

The nation's largest agricultural water district, located in the Central Valley, spent $600,000 on lobbying efforts, according to an analysis by KPCC in partnership with the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That's by far Westlands' biggest annual expenditure for lobbying -- about six times what it spent in 2010.

The lobbying comes as Congress and federal agencies consider how to respond to three years of drought conditions that have cut water supplies across the state and ratcheted up political pressure from the hard-hit agricultural sector, including many of Westlands' customers.

California farmers grow nearly half the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts. The California Farm Water Coalition, an industry group, estimates farmers -- and the processors and truckers who get crops to market -- could lose $5 billion this year due to the drought.

How important is this issue? Well, in recent months it's brought President Obama, the House Speaker and the powerful House Natural Resources Committee to the Central Valley.

Congress is considering two major legislative packages -- one already passed by the House, authored by freshman Republican Rep. David Valadao of Hanford; and one introduced in the Senate by California Democrats Dianne Feinstein, with Barbara Boxer as a co-sponsor.

The bills have the common goal of redistributing water to meet farmers' needs, but they differ on execution and the ramifications.

The House bill, which was co-sponsored by the state's entire GOP delegation, would rewrite water contracts and in the process set aside protections, which has environmental groups up in arms.

The Senate bill would allow regulators to "provide the maximum quantity of water supplies possible" to where it's most needed and boost existing federal drought programs by $200 million.

As is true with many issues in Washington, money is part of the fight. As Bay Area Rep. George Miller, a Democrat, says, "You can make water run uphill if you have enough money."

The DC bucket brigade

California water politics is mostly about geography -- Northern California's watershed versus the Central Valley, which relies on that water coming south to irrigate crops, versus Southern California, with its massive and thirsty urban population.

As the drought has worsened, those various interests have pushed harder for relief through campaign contributions to key members of Congress and by employing lobbyists.  

The two biggest spenders on water issues are Westlands, whose customers own 600,000 acres of farmland in Fresno and Kings counties, and the owners of Kern County-based Paramount Farms, the nation's largest grower of pistachios and almonds.

Just how serious is the quest for water? Last year, Westlands hired four different lobbying firms -- even as the overall amount spent by all groups and corporations on federal lobbying has been going down since 2010. All eight of Westlands' officially registered lobbyists previously worked in government -- including a former Republican congressman from Minnesota.

And the $600,000 Westlands spent in 2013 is only what was reported on required disclosure forms. According to an internal document obtained by Southern California Public Radio, Westlands also paid $90,000 last year to former California Democratic Rep. Tony Coelhofor "Washington representation," which was not included in Westlands' lobbying reports.

Coelho, who did not respond to requests for an interview, is related to one of Westlands' board membersand they are partners in a dairy farm. Westlands also paid another firm nearly $1 million for an "outreach and awareness" campaign.

Democratic lawmaker Miller, who has been on Capitol Hill for more than four decades, says lobbyists keep their "A-game" going all the time, rain or shine, "because you never know when the good Lord's going to turn off the water. So you'd better be ready."

Money is extremely helpful in obtaining access and influence, which is crucial whenever Congress gets involved. That's true whether the cash is in the form of spending on lobbying or campaign donations.

Paramount Farms is owned by Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Los Angeles. Their multi-billion dollar fortune comes from a diverse portfolio that includes Fiji bottled water. They have a controlling interest in the Kern Water Bank Authority, which stores underground supplies of water to irrigate Paramount's nut trees.

The Resnicks don't hire lobbyists at the federal level, but they're generous campaign contributors. They and people who work for their companies have given nearly $457,000 to candidates, political action and party committees since 2011. That includes nearly $321,000 from the Resnicks themselves. (See table at end of story.)

Setting the water table

You can't just read the House and Senate bills and point to paragraphs that directly help either Westlands or the Resnicks. But John Lawrence, a former Capitol Hill staffer who currently teaches at the University of California's DC Center, says water bills are "very often written specifically in a vague sort of way." Congressman Miller adds: "There's rarely any word in a piece of water legislation that's there accidentally."

The bill that passed in the House would mandate an increase in pumping from the Sacramento Delta. Doug Obegi, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that water would primarily go to Central Valley Project contractors, including the biggest -- the Westlands Water District.

The bill also extends for 40 years all existing federal water service contracts -- including the one for Westlands. Lawrence says that takes away any flexibility to make water decisions for a generation. He notes that once you've delivered a "signed, sealed contract, let alone been directed to do it by the Congress," you've taken away any chance at reviewing how future water should be allocated.

Feinstein's Senate bill includes several provisions that would allow Delta water to be sent farther south to Kern County. Patricia Schifferle of the environmental group Pacific Advocates says, because of previous legislative amendments, the water would be made available to the groundwater bank controlled by Feinstein's supporters -- the Resnicks.

(Neither Westlands nor the Resnicks' holding company, Roll International, responded to requests for interviews.)

Feinstein recently revised her bill. This latest version includes a provision to boost Colorado River storage in Nevada, home to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This version could make it to the Senate floor for a vote without going through the committee process.

Horse trading on Capitol Hill isn't new. Some of the lobbying money goes to making sure everyone gets to wet their beak. Miller notes that deals get made -- trading something Midwest lawmakers want in the farm bill for something Central Valley interests need in the water bill. He says there are "a lot of chits out there that have been planted around the anticipation of a water bill coming to the floor of Congress."

If the House bill became law, Ron Stork of Friends of the River says not only would habitat restoration be hurt, but so would two other water consumers: farmers and residential users in the northern part of the state. Delta farmers, with some of the oldest water rights in California, and the city and county of Sacramento, which contract for drinking water, would find their supply "commandeered and delivered south."

The lobbying isn't limited to Capitol Hill. It also takes place at the agency level. John Lawrence says private meetings are held behind closed doors at places such as the Bureau of Reclamation or the Environmental Protection Agency, where there's "greater wiggle room" on how water policies are implemented. Those conversations are confidential, not debated openly in Congressional committee hearings.

Westlands' reports show it lobbied the EPA, the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department (which includes the Bureau of Reclamation) and the Council on Environmental Quality, in addition to Congress and the White House. Three of the water district's lobbyists are former high-ranking officials of the Interior Department.

There's even a place lobbyists and campaign contributions collide: Schifferle from Pacific Advocates notes a 2012 breakfast fundraiser for Feinstein in the offices of one of Westlands' lobbying firms, held "right around the time" of a budget amendment that gave water agencies access to federal water.

In Washington, certain wells never run dry.

Top Resnick family campaign contribution recipients from 2011-2013

Recipient Amount

Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman (Henry Waxman) $100,000

Democratic National Committee Services Corp $30,800

Republican National Committee $30,800

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee $21,700

Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) $17,900

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee $13,000

Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno) $12,300

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) $11,400

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Fresno) $11,300

Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) $10,400

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) $10,000

Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Brookline) $10,000

LA Political Action Committee $10,000

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) $10,000

Peak Political Action Committee $10,000

To Organize a Majority Political Action Committee $10,000

Sen, Dianne Feinstein (D-California) $9,800

Data source: Federal Election Commission via OpenSecrets.org.

Westlands Water District board members' campaign contributions from 2011-2013

Board Member Democratic Republican Total

James Anderson $2,500 $1,000 $3,500

Thomas Birmingham $10,500 $17,500 $28,000

Frank Coelho Jr. $2,600 $4,750 $7,350

Larry Enos 0 $1,000 $1,000

Daniel Errotabere $875 $5,525 $6,400

Georgianne Errotabere $875 $875 $1,750

Jean Errotabere $875 $4,300 $5,175

Gary Esajian $1,000 $8,500 $9,500

Bridget Neves 0 $2,500 $2,500

Todd Neves 0 $18,850 $18,850

Donald Peracchi $13,600 $45,500 $59,100

Judith Peracchi $5,000 $2,500 $7,500

Alan Sano $2,500 $1,000 $3,500

Christopher Woolf $2,000 $9,374 $11,374

Sarah Woolf $3,000 $3,500 $6,500

TOTALS $45,325 $126,674 $171,999

Data source: Federal Election Commission via OpenSecrets.org.

Akerman LLP	$80,000	Westlands Water District	Findaro, Joseph
Brownstein, Hyatt et al	$240,000	Westlands Water District	Bernhardt, David L Johnson, Luke Smith, Ryan
Mercury	$160,000	Westlands Water District	Elias, Alan Mullen, Erick Weber, Vin
Mercury/Clark & Weinstock	$80,000	Westlands Water District	Elias, Alan Mullen, Erick Weber, Vin
Sidley Austin LLP	$40,000	Westlands Water District	Karen, Catherine