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 régime , 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 régime 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 the 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.