AMERICA IN THE GRIP OF BUSH'S 'IRON TRIANGLE'
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THE OBSERVER
International News
Sunday, 3 December 2000
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,406082,00.html
Ed Vulliamy in Washington
Ed Vulliamy in Washington reveals the network of big business interests that
is now waiting to reap its rewards from an administration that may stand for
little but revenge and greed
The ominous joke in Washington is that George W. Bush is learning how to
pronounce the word 'inaugural'.
The city that has for eight years filled its cappuccino bars with the staff
of a reforming presidency is bracing itself for change: an influx of Texan
Stetsons and Cuban heels - and a politics stamped with a familiar brand
name, the Bush family. 'It will be,' says one senior White House aide, 'the
restoration of the aristocracy, motivated by revenge and greed.'
The Bush Transition Office has just opened across the River Potomac from the
leafy, liberal streets of Georgetown in McClean, Virginia, where
heavy-hitting lobbies of the conservative Right fill the phone directory.
>From here, where workers are rewiring to make way for more phone lines,
Bush's presidency-in-waiting will take shape, even though the election
result remains contested.
The question the capital is asking is the one posed by White House
communications director Sidney Blumenthal on Friday: 'If Bush wins, who is
the President?'
That is a question more and more Americans are raising as Bush's grip on the
White House strengthens by the day. Just what does 'Dubya' stand for? The
answer seems to be: not much. The more you look at Bush the less you see.
For every clue as to what kind of President he would make, there is a
question; for every pattern, a glitch.
The clues are among the entourage, either packing for Washington or else
already here, planning the next four years while Bush bides his time -
relaxing, apparently - at his ranch. If there was ever a President defined
by his donors and patrons, it is Bush. Like a player in a baroque
allegorical drama, he is not really a person, more a personification of
interests.
They come from three overlapping spheres of influence: his father's ancien
regime , the clique of political operatives with which 'Dubya' has governed
the nation's second biggest state, and - most formidably - business
interests behind the Republican Party that have waited eight long Clinton
years for this moment. For all of them, another Bush administration is
payback time.
A network controlled by George Bush Snr first opened the floodgates for the
funds that bought 'W' the election. 'The old man's network,' says Bush's
cousin, John Ellis, 'is probably 50,000 people, and I think they were
looking for some kind of vindication. I don't think you can possibly
overrate the hatred of Bill Clinton in the Republican Party'.
The old guard falls into two categories. The privy council of the last Bush
administration is led by Dick Cheney, getting down to the unfinished
business of 1992 while 'Dubya' is out of town. It includes General Colin
Powell, former Secretary of State James Baker, Pentagon official Paul
Wolfowitz and National Security aide Condoleeza Rice. From his father's
domestic team, Bush has former Federal Reserve appointee Lawrence
Summers,and faithful soldier Andrew Card to be his Chief of Staff - of whom
one aide said: 'At least he's not a Texan.'
Then there is the overlapping circle of investors and corporate barons made
rich by Bush's father, collected into the Carlyle Group, a
cabalistic,Washington-based merchant bank chaired by Ronald Reagan's former
Pentagon chief, Frank Carlucci. Carlyle is a financial club for Bush Snr's
intimate circle and can expect to enjoy political clout in the White House.
Bush Snr is one of the bank's paid emissaries. Among the partners are his
economic adviser Richard Darman and Dubya's front man in Florida, James
Baker (Bush Jnr has his own connections with Carlyle).
From this ancien regime comes talk of bipartisanship, conciliatory gestures
to a riven nation and Congress, and even recruitment of pro-Bush Democrats
into the Cabinet. But behind the figureheads are other faces - the hardline
Texan managers of the most disciplined and lavishly funded political
campaign in recent history.
And behind them are the real power brokers, hands to guide the White House
from within the world of business and industry with whom Bush has worked for
years, who wield awesome power in American society and owe no debt to
compromise.
In the capital, the point man works both on stage and behind the scenes.
When the Supreme Court convened on Friday, Bush was represented by Theodore
Olson, a high-profile attorney and former partner of Kenneth Starr.
But, backstage, Olson is the Washingtonian who has kept the right-wing
candle burning on the capital's dining circuit during the Clinton years,
along with his socialite wife, Barbara. It is intriguing that Bush should
have appointed the man who accepted some $2.4 million from the
ultra-conservative donor Mellon Scaife for what became known as the Arkansas
Project - the conspiracy to launch the Paula Jones lawsuit, to detonate the
fruitless Whitewater 'scandal' through paid operatives in Little Rock, and
ultimately to force the impeachment of President Clinton.
Now Olson has become ambassador inside the Beltway for the state of Texas.
To most Washingtonians, Texas - with its 1.4 million children without
health insurance, squandered surplus, appalling pollution record,
exaggerated school standards, housing crisis and execution factory - is not
an alluring model for America.
But Bush has, from the beginning, pointed to Texas as the validation of his
presidential collateral. And the Bush power base - of his own generation, at
least - lies in his fiefdom, in whose image he would forge the nation.
Most obviously, Bush will continue to lean on the so-called 'Iron Triangle'
of his closest aides throughout his political career. The most visible of
these is spokeswoman Karen Hughes, whom CNN's Charles Zewe says 'treats the
media like a covey of quail that can be rounded up'.
'Bush,' says a Texan Democrat consultant, 'is the boy in the bubble of
infotainment.' Hughes, an army brat born in Paris (France, not Texas), with
size-12 shoes and Texan-sized voice, will be the woman to make sure the
bubble does not burst, like the boil on Bush's cheek the week after he first
thought he was elected.
The second point of the triangle is the buzz-cut Oklahoman Joe Allbaugh,
quiet enforcer of the governor's will. He would be the White House 'thought
police', with a further role to mediate friction that exists, hidden,
between Hughes and the apex of the Iron Triangle, Karl Rove.
Rove goes back nearly 30 years in Republican politics, 25 of them with the
Bush family. He moved to Texas to work for the then Congressman Bush in
1973. Talking to him is like meeting a robot; it is hard to detect any sign
of feeling other than devotion to and control over his current master, for
whom he has fought every political campaign. Even Tom Paulen, former
chairman of the Texas Republican Party, calls Rove 'a control freak'.
Rove was Bush Snr's emissary to his own son. He had the idea 'Dubya' should
run 'some time during the 1995 session', he told The Observer - and in this
he is more than a political strategist. Rove does not only form part of the
Iron Triangle; he welds it to other scaffolding in the Bush political
edifice. He is the centre of a nexus that connects not only the
gubernatorial machine to Bush Snr, but to the business and party interests
that sought out George W. Bush (rather than the other way round) to win back
the White House at, literally, any cost.
'I never dreamed about being President,' says Bush, 'All of a sudden,
people started talking to me about the presidency'. Karl Rove organised the
meetings in 1998 that began the Republicans' courting of this real-life
Forrest Gump - for a reason.
Clinton was regarded as an illegitimate President because he gave certain
quarters of American power a hard time - characterised by a new term in the
Wall Street lexicon during the aftermath of the election: 'Bush stocks'.
'There's been a sigh of relief,' said Larry Smith, an analyst with Sutro in
New York. Bush's proclaimed victory was greeted by a sudden leap in the
share value of big pharmaceutical companies, big insurers of health care,
and the big oil and tobacco companies.
While Rove was masterminding Bush's gubernatorial victory of 1994 in Texas,
he himself had another job with one of these companies: a paid political
intelligence operative for the Philip Morris cigarette company, reporting to
another Bush aide, Jack Dillard, ubiquitous tobacco lobbyist.
Unlike that of Clinton, Bush's record on tobacco does not displease the
industry; he decreed it impossible for the civil lawsuit against tobacco
companies to proceed in Texas. 'The prospect of Bill Clinton gone and a Bush
presidency makes the tobacco industry almost giddy,' says Martin Feldman, an
analyst of the industry for the consultants Salomon Smith and Barney.
Corporate delight at the prospect of a Bush team heading for Washington
stems from the core political philosophy Bush brings from Texas to
Washington, which is also Rove's principal achievement. In Texas legalese it
was called 'tort reform'; in Washington it translates as grand-scale
deregulation of business, services and industry.
Even if a full-blooded Bush agenda is partly clipped by the pall of
illegitimacy and the narrowness of his official victory, this is the Texas
manifesto the newcomers to Washington will be determined - and likely - to
accomplish.
It was described to The Observer this last week by a senior White House aide
as 'bringing the business special interests into politics so they can take
over the regulatory bodies of government and regulate themselves'. For
example: the Environmental Protection Agency, the fair trade agencies, the
health, safety and 'human resources' executives, the regulation of industry,
education, guns, medicine and land use.
And so, behind the political 'Iron Triangle' is the real 'Iron Triangle'
also lying in wait with Bush - the businessmen.
Foremost among these is Don Evans, the rainmaker. Evans, an oil executive
from Bush's home town of Midland, Texas, goes back three decades with the
governor, who was his childhood friend and confidant. Evans became his
presidential campaign chairman, filling the biggest political war chest of
all time.
He is now tipped by one Republican insider for 'any job he wants' in the
White House. Whatever that is, he will be among the most influential
politicians in America. The word among Republicans is that Evans may have
his eye on the chairmanship of the party's National Committee.
Evans represents the industry in which Bush himself began his career, which
propels the economy of Texas and was crucial to both his and his father's
victories - oil.
No industry has a higher stake in 'tort reform' than the drillers of black
gold, and few look forward to a deregulating Bush administration more than
the executives of the oil industry, which has already been promised almost
unfettered exploration and drilling rights.
But there are other interests too, and two of them - urban development and
health care - combine with oil in another mighty figure in the background of
a Bush administration. If he must thank his father for his name, Bush must
thank Richard Rainwater for his money.
Last year, as he prepared to run for President, Bush liquidated a blind
trust he created to hold his assets - many of them in oil, real estate,
health care and other companies owned by Rainwater, a contributor to Bush's
campaigns and with whose money Bush aquired his windfall stake in the Texas
Rangers baseball team.
Rainwater is a billionaire buying into beleaguered companies at discount
prices and reselling when everyone wants in. But he is also involved in
companies, including oil firms, that are heavily regulated with hundreds of
millions in government contracts.
One, a hospital chain called Columbia/HCA, is the subject of a federal
investigation into Medicare fraud. Another, Charter Behavioural Health
Systems (in which Bush held investments), is subject to regulatory
scrutiny, while another - Crescent Real Estate, which operates mental
hospitals - has its multi-million-dollar government input under federal
investigation. Rainwater is not himself accused of any misdemeanour, but in
each case, the prospect of Bush's promise to privatise and deregulate the
health system is a tempting one.
Rainwater is most famous for investing the oil wealth of the third point of
Bush's business Iron Triangle - the Bass Brothers, builders of the
metropolis Fort Worth. He turned the $50 million they invested with him in
1970 to $5 billion in 1986, mainly through timely investing in Texaco oil
and Disney.
This is how the wheels go round in Texas: in 1997, Governor Bush supported a
tax reform Bill aimed to cut, among other things, school property taxes.
The reform saved Rainwater's Crescent Real Estate $2.5m.
In 1999, Bush rushed through an emergency tax relief package to help
independent oil producers as prices slumped. According to state records, the
biggest beneficiary was the Pioneer Natural Resources oil company, with a
$1m tax break. Filings with the Security Exchange Commission show Rainwater
to own 55m shares in Pioneer.
The scale model for this entwinement of political and commercial interests
was the inclusion of the oil companies in drawing up Texas's clean air
regulations last year. The rules were devised by Bush's office in
collaboration with Marathon Oil and Exxon, and left companies to set their
own standards voluntarily.
But while the governor was waiting to sign the new 'self-regulatory' Bill
into law, the town of Odessa, Texas, was covered by a pall of black smoke so
thick that drivers had to switch on their lights during daylight.
Odessa, said Dr David Karman of the Texas Natural Resources Commission, 'was
like having an open incinerator in your backyard. Only this incinerator is
burning a very large soup of toxic chemicals'.
In bringing the politics of Texan non-government into national government,
Bush is in perfect harmony with two of his most powerful lieutenants in
Congress: Dick Armey, leader of the House, and Tom Delay, the Republicans'
feared chief whip.
Delay, who led the impeachment of President Clinton and whose office
mobilised the baying crowds bussed around Florida last month, is seen as he
coming man and leader of the extreme Right, with which Bush must deal.
Delay has called the Environmental Protection Agency the 'Gestapo' of
government.
Armey has likewise attacked what he calls 'government shackles on
enterprise'; both men have sworn absolute loyalty to Bush.
And as it happens, both men, like George W. Bush, come from Texas. Another
Iron Triangle.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
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