From: eaw@alliant.com (Eric Woudenberg)
Subject: Party of Special Interests -- Washington Post Article
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems Corp.
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 15:37:34 GMT

[This is an article by Jack Beatty of the Washington Post,
 printed in the July 15th issue of The Japan Times.]

		Party of Special Interests
Washington - The chairman of the Democratic National Committee is a
lobbyist. Those given to seeing the world in a grain of sand could
make much of that resonant particle. For Ron Brown is not only an
African-American, which is fitting in a party sustained by black
votes; he is also a partner in the mother of all Washington lobbying
concerns, Patton, Boggs and Blow, which is lementably fitting for a
party whose claim to represent the common man and woman is vitiated
by its lucrative alliance with lobbyists and PAC-men.
   This is a scandal. It is a scandal that, according to a report in
the Wall Street Journal, the man who advises Bill Clinton on
U.S.-Israeli relations is also the general counsel to the largest of
the pro-Israel lobbies; the man who advises Clinton on foreign policy
is a lobbyist for Toyota; the man who helped Clinton select his
running-mate lobbies for Occidental Petroleum; and the man described
as Clinton's "general adviser" is a vice chairman of Washinton's most
odious PR firm, which has specialized in shilling for bloody-minded
dictators. And yet Clinton vows to clean the stables of "high-priced
lobbyists and Washington influence peddlers."
   It is a scandal that Stuart Eizenstat, who has lobbied against
unions for the National Association of Manufacturers, should loom so
large in the Clinton campaign. In an article titled "Should Japan Fear
Bill Clinton?" in a recent issue of the International Economy,
Eizenstat writes, "How well founded is this Japanese fear of the
Democrats? Not very, in our opinion." With Eizenstat at Clinton's ear,
American workers, not the Japanese, are the ones who should frear the
Democrats. On this dual role as corporate lobbyist and party fixer,
Eizenstat reassured writer William Greider: "You'd be hard-pressed to
find a relationship between my advice to the Democratic Party and my
client list." You could hang a desolating exegesis on the decline of a
peoples' party on just that one sentence.
   It is a scandal that a former Democratic congressman, Ohio's Thomas
"Lud" Ashley can plausibly say of the Washington law firms that employ
this nexus of coat-holders: "If you  ask me who the Democratic Party
is, it's those firms."
   It is a scandal that the Democrats should have fallen into such
hands, and not only for the sake of ideology. For this tatterdemalion
crew reeks of failure. They are the morticians of the era of
Democratic defeat. To seek advice from these discredited men shows
wretched judgment on the part of candidate Clinton and augurs ill for
his success should he survive their political wisdom and make it to
the White House.
   It is a scandal that an institution once identified by half of the
electorate as "the party of average working people" is now seen as
that by only 13 percent. "Anomalous as it might seem," Greider writes
in his important new book "Who Will Tell the People?" "Wall Street is
a major source of financing for the party of working people."
   It is a scandal that 70 percent of the party's political
contributions now come from corporations; and that the average age of
the party's 100,000 regular contributors is 70 - people old enough to
remember when the party delivered for working people.
   I write this with a sorrowing heart, for, given the alternatives,
the Democrats remain our nation's last (if not best) hope; but the
only cure for a party so debauched may be sweeping defeat - the loss
of the presidency, the Senate and the House. From the ashes might
emerge a party not of Washington layers and lobbyists and Wall Street
plungers but of the beautician and the barber, the hotel worker and the
carpenter - the people who have been losing ground under a Reagan-Bush
government of the rich, by the complacent and for the comfortable.
That is where the Democrats' roots are; that is also where the votes
are. But you can't play footsie with the National Association of
Manufacturers or seek approbation from the Wall Street Journal and speak
for such people.
   So we will have to endure agonies of hypocrisy next week as the
Democrats loft paeans to a populist past from which the lure of the
big money has pulled them far, far away.

[Posted by Eric Woudenberg]