There are ironies in history, and Nick Calio is one of them. Mr. Calio was the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs for George Herbert Walker Bush before he held the same position for the son. After his stint in Poppy’s administration he did what all self-respecting former assistants to the president do…he opened his own lobbying firm: O’Brien Calio. By 1998, he was listed as one of the ten most powerful lobbyists in Washington DC. It was in 1998, in the midst of the l’affaire Lewinsky, that Calio sat down for an interview with Elizabeth Drew. Ms. Drew was working on her book, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why, which was about the breakdown of campaign finance laws and, with it, civility and competence in the nation’s capital. Elizabeth Drew is a fine author with a distinguished career, but she is in many ways the female version of David Broder. She values civility very, very highly. She asked Calio about what was happening in Washington. How had it come to this?
Calio had a couple of insights.
“The biggest changes in Washington are fundamental in the way business is done here. Certain Members of Congress don’t know that people could fight all day and go have drinks together at night. People liked each other more, they trusted each other more, and, frankly, they were able to get more done.” He said that some of the Republican members “are surprised that I have Democratic friends, which is really absurd.”
Calio was discussing cultural changes that had occurred in Washington between the late 1980’s and the present (which was the height of the Lewinsky scandal). But, what really changed was who controlled Congress. Calio makes that clear here:
Nick Calio, a Republican lobbyist, says that the Class of ’94 has mellowed “somewhat,” but “it needs to go further.” He added, “By and large the class of ninety-four needs to have a more practical understanding of how far its leadership can go within the confines of the constitutional system. And directly related to that, the class of ninety-four needs to understand what constitutes a victory in legislative and principled terms. There’s a point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.”
It was sound advice, as far as it went. They impeached the president but they came nowhere near removing him from office. As for Nick Calio, he would get a second chance at the job of Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs in the second Bush administration. He’d also become a member of the infamous White House Iraq Group that sold the world false intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq. Don’t worry about Nicky, though, because he is currently “Citigroup’s Executive Vice-President for Global Government Affairs..responsible for government relations for Citigroup and all of its subsidiaries.”
Setting Calio’s career aside, his point about the nature of the Class of ’94 rings very, very true when we look at it in retrospect. That is because once they had a Republican president they, and he, set about straining “the confines of the constitutional system” and demonstrating the validity of their “point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.”
Take a look around today. Just in the week and a half since John McCain announced that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would be his running mate, the McCain campaign has told nineteen separate lies about Gov. Palin’s alleged opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere. It’s the neverending fib. Gov. Palin repeated the lie today during a campaign stop and they are even running political ads touting her fake opposition to the bridge in battleground states. The press keeps calling them on it, the Obama campaign keeps calling them on it, but they just don’t care.
They have a “point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.” And that, in a nutshell, is the kernel of truth about the Republican tactics that we’ve been facing ever since Newt Gingrich led his shock troops to victory in November of 1994. Since that time, the Republican nature has been to say whatever they want and to ignore all criticism and all fact-checking. The McCain campaign is running ads that say that Obama is going to raise everyone’s taxes. It’s not true and they don’t care.
It’s important to understand this about Republicans. We don’t have to copy their tactics to beat them, but we do have to take them into account. They will literally say anything. And they will never allow themselves to be held accountable to anything until you’ve placed them behind bars.
