Who Let the Dogs In? (48 page)

Gramm, of course, maintains that the aid he provided Jerry Stiles, who did $53,000 worth of free work on Gramm’s vacation home, was “routine,” and, one would gather, perfunctory. And the freebie itself was motivated only by Senator Gramm’s noble desire to provide work for unemployed Texans.

Generosity of interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. Can’t wait to hear what Jim Wright has to say about it. Dickie Flatt, too.

My quarrel with Gramm stems not from anything he may have done that was illegal, or at best unethical, but rather from his Business As Usual MO Gramm, spouting his right-wing populism, went to the Senate and promptly fell into the most advanced patterns of legal extortion—to wit, collecting political action committee money like a panhandling fool.

I grant you the fault is not Gramm’s, but the system’s. On the other hand, he has consistently voted against every effort to reform the despicable system of legalized bribery masquerading as campaign contributions that has corrupted the entire political process.

For at least one year, he was the Senate cham-peen PAC money collector, and he’s always right near the top. Lately, as chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, he’s become even more aggressive at scooping up lobby money for his party.

As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Gramm earned a perfect goose egg—a big, fat zero rating—from the Campaign for Financial Democracy, the S&L watchdog organization.

Gramm’s other, less loveable tricks are well known to his colleagues. “Grammstanding” is what his colleagues in the Texas congressional delegation call it when Gramm, having fought some nice goodie for a Texas town—say a new post office for East Boot—then rushes out when the thing is finally approved, despite his vote, to announce it and claim credit for it.

Another favorite Gramm trick is to vote for projects that will help Texas and then to vote against appropriating money for them, so he can retain his reputation as a fiscal watchdog and deficit buster. This ancient and dishonorable legislative practice is usually described by a word beginning with
chicken.

All in all, I’ve no quarrel with Phil Gramm’s performance as a standard-issue, right-wing Republican carrying water for big-money special interests. That, one should expect. But his pose as a friend of the “little man” has always annoyed me.

An ancillary matter reflecting no particular discredit on Gramm, but again on the system as a whole, is the nonperformance of the Senate Ethics Committee. Under what bizarre stretch of logic did they conclude that $53,000 of free work on a vacation home was
not
a gift under the Senate rules. Clearly, the Senate rules police need their heads examined.

While on the subject of idiotic Senate rules, or lack thereof, note the current flap over alleged sexual harassment by Senator Bob Packwood. The new women senators have vowed to strengthen Senate rules against sexual harassment. I have a better idea. Why doesn’t the Senate put itself under the same laws against sexual harassment they passed for everyone else in the country? Eh?

December 1992

Phil Gramm II

I
THINK
IT PROVES
there is a God,” said one Texas liberal of Senator Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign, which is going nowhere fast. Gloating is in violation of the liberal creed, which calls for compassion at all times, especially for those who are getting kicked around. On the other hand, we are talking about Phil Gramm.

The New Republic
pronounced him “profoundly amoral, committed only to his own political advancement, ruthless in getting his way and untrustworthy in accounting for his actions.” That pretty much sums up the press reaction to our boy Phil so far. And we are not talking about “the liberal media” here.
Mean, heartless, amoral, ruthless,
and
calculating
are words that have appeared in profiles of Gramm across the board.

Public reaction, as measured in various polls, hovers around 9 percent support from Republicans nationally. His presidential campaign is already a standard joke; there are several variations on “the candidate for those who think Bob Dole is not mean enough.”

Of course, I would no more write off Phil Gramm at this point than I would get near a wounded rattler. At one of his many extremely profitable money-raising soirees earlier this year, Gramm quoted Ben Franklin’s line that a man can have but three reliable friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money. Gramm went on to say that he has a young wife, an old dog, and “Thanks to you and your support tonight, I have the most reliable friend that you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.”

The dread words
John Connally
do occur, do they not? (For those who have forgotten, Connally, always a boardroom favorite, ran for president in 1980, spent $6 million, and got one delegate.)

Nevertheless, Gramm is sitting on one of the biggest campaign kitties in history, off to a flying start with $5 million “left over” from his Senate campaign and augmented by more millions collected since ($4.1 million at one event in February—a world record). Gramm, twice the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is familiar with almost every big giver in politics. He received more money from medical and insurance interests opposed to President Clinton’s health-care reforms than any other member of Congress. With his characteristic kindness, he said of health-care reform: “We have to blow up this train and the rails and trestle and kill everyone on board.”

But Gramm’s single largest special-interest donor group continues to be oil and gas. During a discussion of pending legislation, a reporter recently suggested to Gramm that the bill under discussion would help natural gas companies but hurt homeowners. Gramm replied, “Any policy has winners and losers.”

One of the most telling things about Phil Gramm is that those who know him best like him least. One of the safest bets in Washington for years now has been who would win a secret Senate poll for Most Disliked Member. Gramm’s inevitable response is: “I didn’t come to Washington to be loved, and I haven’t been disappointed.” One member of Congress who has dealt with him describes him as “pond slime,” which is pretty much the general reaction.

The word
grammstanding
comes from the man’s notorious habit of claiming credit for work he didn’t do; some lowly Texas lawmaker will toil away for months to get a post office or a factory or some modest piece of pork for his district, only to find that Gramm, who never helped and often hurt the effort, has sprung forth with a news release claiming credit for same.

So far, Gramm’s presidential campaign has netted him (a) publicity about an ill-fated 1974 investment in a dirty movie with his then brother-in-law (Gramm has denied knowledge of the nature of the film, although the ex-brother-in-law insists that he knew); (b) publicity about his own “Willie Horton,” an ex-drug dealer whom Gramm’s office helped spring from prison with unhappy results (again, Gramm says he knew nothing of the episode, despite some evidence that he did); and (c) renewed publicity about the Jerry Stiles case.

Stiles was a savings and loan rip-off artist who cost the taxpayers $200 million. He was convicted last year on eleven counts of conspiracy, bank bribery, and misapplication of funds. In 1987, Stiles advanced Gramm $117,000, interest-free, for renovation of Gramm’s vacation home on the Eastern Shore. Three months after the work was finished, Stiles billed Gramm $63,433. Gramm had been pushing legislation that would have helped Stiles’ failing S&Ls. By 1989, when Stiles was in big trouble with federal regulators, Gramm urged the regulators to go gently on Stiles and to consider his pleas for help and waivers from federal rules.

Rather than gloating about Gramm’s foundering campaign, I think we should consider some of the troubling questions that this raises about Texas politics and Texas voters. Why is it that we have elected and reelected a man so unpleasant that his own colleagues can’t stand him and whose record in politics disqualifies him for higher office? The question is not what’s wrong with Phil Gramm, but what’s wrong with us.

July 1995

Phil Gramm III

W
OULD
A
BLEEDING-HEART
liberal kick a guy while he’s down? Should a girl like I, in whom the milk of human kindness flows copiously for everyone, from protein-shy Hottentots to the glandular obese, actually aim a few swift boots at the prone form of Senator Phil Gramm? Nah. But it’s tempting.

We liberals do sometimes forsake our vows of compassion for all mankind. I recall publicly gloating about the defeat of some of the noxious fat-heads Texas used to send to Congress. But hell, I even felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left. There’s nothing you can do about being born liberal—fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.

From the Texas Democratic point of view, it’s a shame that Gramm didn’t stay in at least through New Hampshire and spend himself broke. Now, he’ll just come home and clobber whoever the Democrat is with his leftover millions.

It’s hard to write about Gramm without sounding mean; the national reporters’ favorite line was, “Even his friends don’t like him.” The most touching story I ever heard about Gramm was from a fellow senator who used to tell Gramm: “You’ll never be president, Phil, because you’ve got no heart.”

For some reason, Gramm, who has more than amply demonstrated his indifference to what his colleagues think of him, took this guy seriously. For years afterward, whenever he’d done anything that remotely smacked of compassion, he’d come up to this senator and say: “Whatta ya think, whatta ya think—am I showing heart yet?”

Well, it is sort of touching.

From the point of view of the rest of the country, Texas and Phil Gramm must look like Enid and Joe Waldholtz. Most people keep asking, “But what did she ever see in him?” while the kinder ones reply, “She
must
have married him for money. Give her a little credit—it
couldn’t
have been love.”

What can we say? We keep electing the guy by two-digit percentage margins, and in the rest of the country, he can’t buy his way out of single digits with $20 million. And that’s just Republicans.

He may be a schmuck, but at least he’s our schmuck? (I always think of him as a schmuck from Georgia, but then, I don’t like him.)

I suppose we could just blame him on the Aggies, but I think that’s some kind of “ist”—universityist? While Austin snores along in its false sense of superiority, Texas A&M has in fact become a great university. I’m not suggesting that we ban Aggie jokes as politically incorrect, but let’s at least recognize reality.

My real problem with Phil Gramm is ill-timed; it’s the wrong season to make this case, but I’ll try anyway. Set aside that I don’t agree with him about anything. I don’t agree with Representative Charlie Stenholm, a Blue Dog Democrat, about anything either. But you notice that Stenholm and the rest of the Blue Dogs have been sweating like farm workers to find a compromise on the budget impasse in Washington. They understand that compromise is necessary.