The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (26 page)

After so many years in Washington, Connaughton was hungry, and not just to make money.
He wanted to get things done and play at high levels. He’d never made it there with
Biden—public service seemed to bring more humiliation than triumph—but the private
sector was closer to a meritocracy: you got rewarded according to what you produced,
not the whims and flaws of the boss. The job came with tremendous pressure—the heads
of trade associations were particularly demanding—but no one was “dumb fuck.” Quinn,
Gillespie, and Connaughton were three Irish guys from modest backgrounds who believed
in hard work and loyalty. They weren’t crooks like Jack Abramoff. Connaughton loved
his partners and what they built together, and his years at Quinn Gillespie were the
happiest he spent in Washington. So he got a little defensive when people talked about
lobbying as if it were something dirty. Hell, almost all of Washington was suckling
at the corporate tit (he had seen that at Covington & Burling), most of them doing
the exact same thing as the few thousand registered lobbyists who got slammed for
everyone’s sins.

He opened a brokerage account and lived in a few custom-made suits. After a few years
he bought his first house, a town house in Georgetown, then a condo in Playa del Carmen,
Mexico, right on the Gulf, for $420,000, then a beautiful thirty-nine-foot Italian
powerboat that cost him $175,000 secondhand. But he kept his shitty American car.

A friend of Connaughton’s, whom he’d met on the Biden presidential campaign, once
told him, “This would sound strange to ninety-nine percent of Americans, but four
hundred thousand a year doesn’t go as far as it used to. I’ve got my mortgage on the
house in Great Falls, two kids in private school”—everyone in Washington sent their
kids to private school—“and I’m lucky if I save any money on four hundred grand.”
Connaughton had met his best Washington friends on that campaign, and some of them
had made it like him, but the ones who stayed in public service longest painted themselves
into a corner financially. In Washington there were no crosscurrents, no career opportunities
that came along other than the one business of the company town. It was the capital
of the planet and unimaginably richer than at any time in American history, but still
an isolated town, a world apart.

In a certain way, lobbying was based on the web of Washington friendships. This was
one reason congressional aides were in such demand on K Street. A senator’s chief
of staff would return a lobbyist’s phone call if he knew and liked the guy, thinking:
“I kind of want to help him. If I need him to do an event he’ll do one for me, and
I get good poop from him.” Lobbying provided a valuable flow of information and analysis
back and forth between corporations and government officials. If a senator was a sort
of judge, a lobbyist was an advocate giving him the best arguments on one side of
a case.

There was a problem, of course, which was that usually no one made it into the room
to argue the other side—and never anyone able to put up anything like the kind of
money the corporations paid to lobbyists and campaigns. Anyway, a senator wasn’t a
sort of judge. Maybe once, maybe Proxmire or Javits. But now senators were looking
beyond the briefs—to the cash as well as the politics—to decide the case. The lobbyists
were just intermediaries, hired guns. Blame the special interests, with all their
money and the access that came with it, and beyond them the campaign finance laws
that allowed cash to flood elections. “I’m in the room because I’ve raised money for
you, and I can help you find positions that are going to raise more money,” Connaughton
said. “If that were stopped, then you get back to what Jack and I believe we are:
smart guys who were good advocates.”

Connaughton later developed a “universal theory” of money in American life since the
1980s: “When the benefits exploded on both Wall Street and Washington, when it became
possible to make millions of dollars in corporate booty—I’m a living example of it,
no one’s ever heard of me and I walked out of Washington with millions of dollars—when
the cost of certain behaviors diminished, when norms began to erode and disappear
that had held people back at least from being garish about the way they made money,
the culture changed. It changed on Wall Street and it changed in Washington.”

Without meaning to, Connaughton had become a Professional Democrat. This was what
he called the class of Washingtonians—lobbyists, lawyers, advisers, consultants, pundits,
consiglieres, fixers—who shuttled between the shower of corporate cash ever falling
on the capital and a series of increasingly prominent positions in Democratic Party
politics. (There were Professional Republicans, too, of course—Ed Gillespie was one—who
moved through Washington at least as easily as the Professional Democrats, because
their party affiliation didn’t require them to pretend that they disapproved of corporations
and big-money politics.) Wealth added to their power, power swelled their wealth.
They connected special interests to party officials using the adhesive of fundraising.
They ate breakfast with politicians, lunch with the heads of trade associations, and
dinner with other Professional Democrats. Behind their desks were “power walls”—photo
galleries showing them smiling next to the highest-ranking politicians they knew.
Their loyalty was to the firm first, then their former boss in politics, then their
party, and then—if he was a Democrat—the president.

Washington was a small town where everyone was one or two degrees away, and you had
better be nice to whomever you met at the telecom happy hour or the financial services
get-to-know-you function, because if you weren’t, it would get back fast. Quinn Gillespie
encouraged its lobbyists to go out every night—the information generated through networking
was valuable. Connaughton did his share, less over time—he disliked big parties, and
eventually he had done so many events that he would valet-park his car, walk in, break
out in a rash, and decide to leave. After a couple of questions, he and someone new
would have each other sized up in the city’s hierarchy—Biden guy, Clinton White House,
works for Jack Quinn, telecom accounts—which determined how much they wanted to know
each other. With the Alabama chip still on his shoulder, he was incapable of bullshitting
about his own importance.

He remained single, though he came close to marrying a couple of times. If he had,
his lobbying business might have increased exponentially. Power couples could switch
off between government and the private sector, one spouse bringing in money while
the other climbed the rungs of government, sharing whatever intelligence they picked
up along the way. Connaughton dealt with a Senate chief of staff on a whole series
of financial issues before finding out that he was married to a high-level banking
executive. In Washington, pillow talk could be worth millions.

Certain couples belonged to the subset of Washington’s permanent class having to do
with the financial sector, the Wall Street–Washington axis—Treasury officials, Banking
Committee staffers, regulators. Connaughton called it the Blob. (There were other
blobs—for example, in defense, the military-industrial complex—that he never got to
know.) Members of the financial blob were unusually tight with one another. In the
case of one couple, the husband was an ex-lobbyist who worked on a key Senate committee,
the wife an ex-Treasury official who went over to the SEC. They networked night and
day, playing the long game, and when the two of them decided to cash in for good,
they would be worth a lot of money.

*   *   *

Quinn Gillespie set out to do as little fundraising for politicians as possible. Hosting
events downtown was the second-rate way of bringing in business—the firm thought it
could win by being smart and strategic. But the politicians wouldn’t leave it alone.
Connaughton would secure a meeting for a client with a senator through the chief of
staff. A few days later, he would get a call from the senator asking him to attend
a thousand-dollar-a-head fundraiser. There was nothing to say except “I’d be delighted.”
Before long, the partners were maxing out on their fifty-thousand-dollar limit in
contributions per election cycle, and Quinn Gillespie was bundling its share of campaign
money, though never as much as the biggest players, like Patton Boggs and the Podesta
Group, which did events almost every week.

A Quinn Gillespie fundraising event was typically a breakfast in the firm’s conference
room, a bacon-and-eggs buffet on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, the only mornings
when senators were reliably in Washington. It would start around eight, but Connaughton
couldn’t count the times a senator would come in at 7:45 and he would think, “Oh shit,
we’re both half awake and I have to entertain him for fifteen minutes.” As host, he
or Quinn would give the senator an over-the-top introduction: “One of the great public
servants of our time and personally a wonderful human being, he called me when my
child was sick…” Over to the senator, who would tell a couple of lame jokes, the clients
would laugh, and then they’d get down to business. When Connaughton started out in
lobbying, it was considered unseemly to combine raising money with discussing issues,
but that line eroded over time like everything else, and eventually a pro like Chris
Dodd, who was always loose and fun, with his red face and dark eyebrows and thick
white senatorial hair, would just go around the conference table and ask each donor,
“What do you care about?” Three weeks after an event, Connaughton would call the senator’s
chief of staff, who would say, “Hold on, the senator wants to talk to you directly”—for
he was now part of the senator’s political family. After a year without an event,
it would become almost impossible to get the senator on the phone, and Connaughton
would have to schedule another breakfast.

In 2001 he and Quinn organized a fundraiser for Biden, who had just become chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was up for his sixth Senate term in
2002. The event raised almost seventy-five thousand dollars for his former boss. Two
years later, he hosted another event. On both occasions, Biden failed to thank him.
It was too much, and he complained to a close friend who had been working for Biden
since before the speech in Tuscaloosa in 1979 and who’d taken Connaughton to lunch
as a thank-you for the second fundraiser. Two weeks later, Biden sent him a note.
“Jeff, you’ve always been there for me,” it read. “I hope you know I will always be
there for you.”

Connaughton never really sold himself as someone who could get to Biden—in twelve
years he only once asked Biden to meet with a client—but he made a cold calculation
that it was worth maintaining the illusion of closeness, which meant enduring the
slights. No one except Biden still thought Biden was going to be president—that part
of the myth had become something of a joke—but chairman of Foreign Relations was a
powerful position, and during the 2004 campaign, Biden was on John Kerry’s short list
for secretary of state, and anyway, it wouldn’t have been worth very much to be known
around Washington as an “ex–Biden guy.” Being a Biden guy gave him stature with corporations
trying to navigate the capital. So, publicly at least, he remained one.

In late 2003, Quinn Gillespie was bought by WPP, a London firm that was the world’s
largest advertising and public affairs company. The partners’ share of the sale would
be paid out in three installments over the next four years, and the eventual price
would depend on Quinn Gillespie’s profitability. Every dollar of profit would be multiplied
in the price. Connaughton began to work harder than ever, and at night, in bars and
restaurants, he would figure out his expected millions on the back of a napkin, constantly
recalculating as the firm’s income statements changed. From 2005 to 2007 Quinn Gillespie
made almost twenty million a year, and toward the end of the earn-out period, maximizing
revenues and minimizing expenses became such an obsession that Quinn would say they
were digging for change in the sofas. When Connaughton finally cashed in, he was rich.

PART II

DEAN PRICE

A two-lane asphalt road ran past the woods—white oak, shagbark hickory, Carolina ash—and
in the shadows of the trees a tobacco barn was year by year collapsing on itself,
the metal roof sloping inward, pieces of bare siding hanging loose from nails. Nearby,
a white clapboard house with empty windows squatted at the roadside half smothered
in tree branches and vines, while a fire-scorched handwritten sign on the outside
wall still advertised
CRUSH
. Farther along, the road took a turn and a tidy brick ranch house with a big satellite
dish mounted on top stood in the golden sunlight of a red-brown field. Another bend,
a gentle hill, deep woods again, then an abandoned metal warehouse alone in a clearing.
The road straightened and flattened and came to a stoplight where a pair of strip
malls faced each other, parking lots full, a Walgreen’s across from a McDonald’s,
Shell opposing BP. Another light, a shuttered car dealership, a vast scrap yard with
a mountain of twisted metal and stacked timbers next door to a spinning mill that
was being methodically gutted like a great whale and sold off one part at a time.
Then downtown, the lonely little main street, a tae kwon do studio, a government benefits
office, a closed restaurant, a nameless corner store for rent, two pedestrians in
four blocks, a Dollar General that marked the far end of town. On the other side the
country opened up at once, the road passing fields, corn planted on one, nothing on
the next—weeds and clods of dirt—then a residential development with two-story look-alike
houses in neat rows laid out across someone’s former tobacco farm. And beyond the
subdivision, isolated on acres of grass behind a split-rail fence and a man-made lake,
the supersized faux château of a celebrity NASCAR driver.