‘Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerries under the table. Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet. And they’re very, very expensive. If you really need something done in Washington, and you have the money, and you know the people you have to know to even get a referral to a top firm, that’s where you go.’
That’s from my new book, The 500. The Davies Group is a fiction, of course, but I drew inspiration from my time as a reporter for The Atlantic in DC. I have always been fascinated by Washington’s hidden power players, the men and women who control the action, though their names rarely make the papers. They come in different guises: former politicians, aides and political operatives who still play the game; little-known mandarins who are the true fulcrum of the Washington bureaucracy; think tank founders who disseminate ideas and work the long curve; and money men who operate behind a veil of anonymity and stand to wield more power than ever in the coming election.
‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,’ General MacArthur once told the Senate. Old politicians never fade away — they stick around and get rich. Henry Kissinger is the classic Washington insider. I had him in my mind as I created the powerbroker Henry Davies and his firm in The 500. Kissinger Associates claims simply to provide introductions and strategic advice. It bars clients from acknowledging that they are working with the firm, though over the years a few names have leaked out: Coca-Cola, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and JPMorgan back when it was Chase Manhattan. Kissinger abruptly pulled out as prospective head of the 9/11 Commission when demands grew for him to reveal his patrons. This secrecy, along with Kissinger Associates’ enormous pull — the firm has a revolving door to top defense and foreign policy positions and Kissinger has advised, formally or informally, every president since Nixon — makes the firm irresistible fodder for the imaginations of conspiracy theorists, tinfoil-hatters, and thriller writers like me. What do they really do behind the curtains of their Park Avenue office? No one knows but Kissinger.
Former politicians and their less-well-known aides and operatives cashing in as lobbyists (&”going downtown” as it’s known) is nothing new inside the Beltway. Their names fill the annual power lists, but rarely show up in the newspapers even when they shepherd their desired legislation through Congress.
President Obama campaigned on reducing lobbyists’ sway, and new regulations on the industry have been proposed, but bashing lobbyists may actually push more power to those who work in the shadows. The White House, for instance, still works and solicits money from lobbyists, as the Washington’s Post’s recent reporting has shown, but it has also taken to meeting them at Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House to keep their names off the visitor logs. The recent criticism of lobbyists only fuels the low regard for the profession, which has increased the amount of unregistered lobbying. Lawyers, consultants, advisers — anything but the L-word — can ply their trade without formally declaring so, as long as formal lobbying takes up less than 20 percent of their time. Tom Daschle and Ed Gillespie are two notable &”stealth lobbyists,” the term used by the Sunlight Foundation in its work on this issue. Newt Gingrich’s creative nomenclature for pulling strings — he was paid $1.6 million as a &”historian” for Freddie Mac — was particularly rich, and caused him a lot of heartburn on the campaign trail. Lobbying on the down-low has become so bad that the American League of Lobbyists cried foul and asked for more regulation, to force stealth lobbyists to follow the same rules as their registered peers.
There are those who push ideas for cash and those who push cash for ideas. The Koch brothers, through decades of careful, quiet movement building, helped create libertarian and conservative powerhouses like Cato, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, which midwifed the Tea Party Movement. Only in the past few years has the &”Kochtopus” received attention in major news outlets. Grover Norquist, a name little-known outside the Beltway, and his outfit, Americans for Tax Reform, is perhaps the best example of how to build a powerful movement from behind the scenes.
There has never been a better time for shadowy influence. Thanks to the Citizens United decision, the money men can now pour huge amounts of corporate and special interest cash into political advertising without any fear of repercussions from the Federal Election Commission. The new Super PACS are the most fun you can have with money in politics since Nixon’s re-election team toted cash-stuffed suitcases around Washington in the days before the FEC. With fundraising unlimited and anonymity assured, these new power centers draw the top political talent and heavyweights like Karl Rove and Harold Ickes.
So yes, there is a lot of power hidden away, out of the spotlight, and yes, behind-the-scenes clout is only rising. But how bad is it? What about the stuff of thrillers, going beyond the usual Washington hardball and skullduggery to blackmail, murder and mayhem?
While I was writing The 500, I would routinely ask plugged-in friends and colleagues in DC if they’d ever heard of outright blackmail. One anecdote I couldn’t resist putting in the book (thank God there are no fact-checkers in fiction): A well-known politician, who I will not name because this is all very lightly sourced and only alleged, was in charge of a search committee for a high-profile post. He picked himself in the end, but only after vetting all the other contenders far beyond the usual scrutiny, digging much deeper than might have been strictly necessary. He happened across a lot of useful information that way. And his peers have been careful not to cross him ever since.
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