Part 1

The Gephardt Years

1

The sense of history, power, and even the sight of the building itself sent chills through my body. It was June of 1992, and I was twenty-two and had arrived at the U.S. Capitol. Well, I wasn’t some policy wonk or power broker; I sat out front as one of the official greeters for Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-MO), my working-class hero. My incredibly important duties included answering the phones, greeting visitors, and snipping newspaper stories about politics. Even from the lowest spot on the totem pole, it sure beat my friends’ jobs: selling cars, working in hotels, delivering pizzas. I was in a very different place, at an institution I revered—the U.S. Congress, the people’s House.

I had no idea what went on in Leader Gephardt’s closed-door meetings. Not many of his seventy-plus staffers did, either, for that matter, or even had much interaction with him. But I provided customer service to his visitors with a smile. I felt like a butler, but was honored to play my role.

Money has always been in politics, that’s not a secret. But things started to change in the 1970s. First, Watergate happened. Few remember it was actually a campaign finance scandal that unraveled when $25,000 was discovered in the burglars’ bank account from Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Reforms followed, which set up donation limits and political action committees (PACs). PACs were a new, legal way for unions and companies to funnel their employees’ or members’ money to politicians. They favor big organizations. The larger the company or union, the more employees or members there are to donate to the PAC. The Federal Election Committee was created to oversee these new rules. It was and continues to be a weak regulatory body that is driven by partisan politics more than a desire to regulate money.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that political giving was a form of free speech, a precedent enhanced by Citizens United in 2010. Buckley opened the possibility for “soft money” to come into play—essentially unlimited cash that could be used for vague “party building activities” and “advocacy” but not directly for campaigning. Soon PACs had “hard” and “soft” money accounts. Hard money paid for the campaigns (rallies, ads, get out the vote), soft money paid for everything else, including staff salaries, benefits, travel, and overhead. It took a long time for politicians to really begin to recognize the power of soft money. When soft money got out of control, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) tried to limit it in 2002 through the law unofficially known as McCain-Feingold. It capped donations to parties and essentially killed soft money as we knew it. But the law really just forced soft money away from the parties, as billionaires set up their own outside organizations. A lot more on this later.

In the summer of 1992, Congress was nervous about the role of money in politics. DC had spent the previous summer enthralled by the Keating Five Hearings, a major campaign finance scandal that snared five U.S. Senators for swapping favors for money and time spent with Charles Keating. He looked for help for his business from what would become known as the Keating Five: U.S. Senators Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain, and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI). Keating had made legal political contributions of about $1.3 million to the senators, and he called on them to help him resist regulators who were trying to close his savings and loan operation, Lincoln Savings and American Continental. Keating became a personal friend of McCain following their initial contacts in 1981; McCain and his family made several trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard American Continental’s private jet, for vacations at Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. Senator McCain would spend years after this scandal finding ways to look clean when it comes to political money. He has been so effective that few if any still remember that McCain had such a close relationship with one wealthy donor.

In the end, the senators were found technically innocent of breaking ethics rules. But it was clear from the hearings—and I watched them all—that money had influenced them. It wasn’t corruption as most understand it—I give you money, you vote for my issue—but rather Charles Keating had influenced them by demanding so much of their time. With meetings in DC and Arizona and vacations with Senator McCain, Charles Keating was getting more bang for his money than the average donor, never mind the average constituent.

I didn’t understand why a group of bipartisan senators would be so focused on one person, one donor. Democrats and Republicans alike got caught up in Charles Keating’s drive to make close friends on Capitol Hill. In hindsight, the net result was that big donors split along partisan lines. Since Senator McCain managed to drag a few Democrats down with him, McCain had accidentally protected himself from the Left’s attacks. Politicians noticed. Democrats did not want to be dragged into scandals created by Republicans, and Republicans didn’t want to be dragged into scandals created by Democrats. Politicians shied away from wealthy donors who played both sides. The Keating scandal forced donors to become more partisan. Today, the only groups that give money to both sides are corporations and industry associations.

Accused of doing something illegal or unethical, donors and politicians started defending themselves by turning the accusation into a partisan attack. Members of Congress and staffers worried that they might be implicated in a similar scandal with one false move, so they shied away from even the appearance of campaign finance impropriety. Money had been a minor annoyance to senior Hill staff up to this point, but they used the Keating Five as a last stand against the increasing influence of money: It would be the Hill policy staffs’ Alamo.

Running for election to Congress in the late 1980s or early 1990s required raising campaign money, but not like today. In 1992, the candidates running for the U.S. House couldn’t compete with the big boys running for Senate or governor, so House candidates saved the money and spent it more wisely. The average incumbent Democratic member of the U.S. House in 1990 spent about $425,000 on a campaign.1 Incumbents always have an easier time raising money because they hold power. Throw out a few of the biggest Democratic money raisers (like Dick Gephardt), and the real average was closer to $250,000. Viable challengers could raise half that. Over a two-year election cycle back then, raising money was a part-time undertaking. Your average House of Representatives incumbents would have one event in DC every year and a few smaller ones back home in their districts. Members of Congress didn’t make a ton of calls to big donors outside their district or state and celebrated the $5,000 PAC checks they rarely saw.

With fundraising budgets under $425,000 for House members, power rested with groups that could cobble together contributions of $50,000 to $100,000. For Democrats in 1992, that was the labor movement. This was the high point of their influence. Over seventy-five different international unions, each with a federal PAC, collected smaller donations from their membership that they bundled in one lump donation of $5,000 or $10,000. A Democratic candidate could easily raise $200,000 of a $500,000 campaign just from labor. As campaign spending has increased, labor’s same $200,000 has meant less and less and labor has lost influence to the big donors around the country.

The labor movement never fully adjusted for the changing landscape of political money. With PAC donations limited to $10,000 to each member of Congress, labor today has become the equivalent of the “nice aunt” of Democratic politics: She sends you that little check on your birthday and you will say thank you, but in the end it doesn’t make much difference. Ten $10,000 checks from different unions made labor important in 1992; it could add up to almost 50 percent of the budget for a Democratic candidate for the House. That same $100,000 from Auntie Union in 2014 will be under 10 percent of the million-dollar (or more) budget. The change has been significant, and the failure of the labor movement—the home to middle-class America—to adapt to the modern realities of political money has meant that members of Congress don’t reflect its values. In 1992, you had real champions of the working class: Dick Gephardt and David Bonior (D-MI) both had leadership positions. Today, House Democrats have no labor champion in the House leadership, they have only “friends.”

DC in 1992 had only a few fundraising consultants, and the firm Fraioli-Jost was their king. The rest of the Democratic fundraising class in the early ’90s could fit into a Volkswagen Bug. Besides Mr. Gephardt and Joe Kennedy (D-MA), Fraioli-Jost worked for nearly every House Democrat. Mike Fraioli and Steve Jost developed the first large sweatshop fundraising firm business model. Each of their clients would get one big cattle-call event every year. That was it. Congress was in session for about two weeks a month. Then take out April, August, November, and December, when Congress was basically not in DC, and that left eight months with two available weeks each, or sixteen weeks, to hold one event for each of their clients. During those two-week windows, Fraioli-Jost would host about twenty separate fundraising events for twenty different members. They’d make sure not to schedule fundraising events at the same time or have events for members of the same committee in the House on the same night. At best, a DC donor or lobbyist might have one or two events in a week to attend. Today it’s hard to find a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday (days of the week Congress is in session) that doesn’t offer twenty to twenty-five fundraising events, breakfast through dessert.

To rally money from labor unions, rich people, and companies, the firm hired recent college grads for about seven bucks an hour to mail invites and cold-call donors. Because the firm was hosting so many events, tracking the RSVPs could be confusing. So the phone bank boiler rooms got creative. They’d invent names on the “RSVP to” line of each invite; “RSVP to Steve,” for example. So if a donor called the boiler room and asked for “Steve,” the kid would say, “I’m sorry, Steve’s not in, but can I help you with the congressman’s event next week?” And no matter what the donor said next, the kid would know anyone calling for “Steve” was RSVPing for Representative X’s event. Calls for “Anna” were RSVPs for Congressman Y’s event, and so on.

Fraioli-Jost worked part time for each client, at $2,500 a month. The firm would usually be hired for three months to plan an event, host it, and follow up to collect late checks. The total fundraising bill for a member of Congress was about $7,500 every year, although some members paid for their services throughout the year. Most members now pay at least $7,500 a month for fundraising salaries, with travel and event costs on top of that.

Much of the DC donor community would not contribute or attend fundraising events in the “off year,” the year with no elections. And since election season didn’t begin until late spring of the election year, candidates would raise most of their money in the final two months of the campaign. Of that $425,000 average incumbent member’s budget, a candidate could expect to raise $200,000 in the late summer and fall, in the last few weeks leading up to election day.

This system—one big cattle call of an event per year—created a pretty innocent relationship between the donor and the member of Congress: Donors would get one opportunity to be in a room with a member, and they’d be surrounded by hundreds of others just like them. This arrangement limited the influence of any one donor. If a donor or lobbyist wanted to see a member of Congress or their staff, they’d go directly to the member’s office on the Hill and ask for a meeting. Although lobbyists donated, turning one down for a meeting wasn’t a big deal. If you pissed off one donor, there were so many giving relatively small amounts that it wasn’t going to destroy your chances for reelection. Chiefs of staff and legislative assistants were powerful, and they didn’t associate much with the lobbyist donor world; that was just beneath them.

It was more important to know the key leaders of groups that could endorse members. Labor unions, senior citizens’ groups, women’s groups, and some environmental leaders made the cut for the influence of senior Hill staff. Endorsements mattered much more than money, because these groups could turn out the voters.

Today, the most important person on members’ staff is the fundraiser. Almost all members of Congress employ full-time consultants or direct staff to raise money 365 days a year. Most top donors are on a first-name basis with the fundraiser but would struggle to name a member’s chief of staff.

In 2012, the average price of winning a seat in the U.S. Congress was $1.6 million, a 380 percent increase in just twenty years.2 Since 1990, the number of individual donors who have given more than $10,000 to politics has quadrupled, from 6,500 to nearly 27,000 by 2010. All those rich people didn’t appear out of thin air. They didn’t spontaneously decide that they were going to start forking over massive amounts of money, changing politics, and increasing the influence of donors on the democratic process. The self-fulfilling industry of political fundraisers created the need for the billionaires to donate and the need for politicians to appease the donors.

This is how it happened.

2

Midmorning on a sweltering DC day in July of 1992, Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Gephardt’s deputy chief of staff, asked me to take an envelope from Gephardt’s office on Capitol Hill over to something called the Effective Government Committee at 80 F Street, NW, on the eighth floor of the American Federation of Teachers building. I jumped at the chance—as a twenty-two-year-old do-gooder, the Effective Government Committee (EGC) sounded like a perfect organization for me.

Turns out I’d be disappointed. EGC was Mr. Gephardt’s fundraising shop, his own political action committee. I walked in to my own little Hotel California. I would spend the next fifteen years trying to check out but could never leave.

The EGC office was set up with four desks out front and one large private office in back. Three men in their early twenties were all on phones and looked up in unison as I walked in, but they kept talking and pitching prospects. The man in the big office, John O’Hanlon, a burly guy in his late thirties, peered over his sports section of the Washington Post and invited me in to see him.

“I’m from Mr. Gephardt’s office,” I said, beaming, as I handed him my envelope.

He pried it open and pulled out ten checks for Mr. Gephardt’s campaign totaling $15,000. My heart sank; had I just broken the law? Taking contributions in the Capitol? That, as the Keating hearings had made clear to me, was illegal: Federal officials can’t solicit or receive political money on federal property, which includes congressional offices. What had I done? Was this the beginning of a new Keating Five scandal? Although I was just the courier, I was sure I’d taken part in something dirty.

“Thanks for bringing this over . . . So what’s your deal?” John asked in his slight New England accent. He was the first person from any part of Gephardt’s operation to show any interest in me, the reception desk jockey.

“What do you mean?”

“You know . . . Where are you from? How’d you get into this business? What do you do for Gephardt? What do you do when you’re not here?”

“Oh,” I replied. “Not much . . . I’m from Maryland . . . decided that I really liked Tom Harkin so I volunteered on his campaign, then I got an internship over here after it ended . . . and I play a lot of ice hockey. I’m a goalie.”

“Awesome. You’re a goalie, that’s great. I’m a big Bruins fan . . . Now let me tell you about this operation . . .”

I couldn’t help but like him. This was my kind of guy, engaging, relaxed, Irish, and he clearly loved sports. He explained he was in charge of raising money for Mr. Gephardt. John made me feel wanted, which is the brilliance of any good fundraiser. He had a knack for becoming your best friend in mere seconds. Then he pitched me.

“Look, Lindsay, you can go back, answer the phones, and clip newspapers in that big, boring office where nobody knows who you are. But I’m sensing that it sounds like you want to be in the action. The action is here, at the Effective Government Committee.”

No one in the Capitol office had ever given me a we-want-you speech. I was a cheap date, and John smelled it all over me. In just five minutes I went from despising “dirty money” in politics to desperately wanting to join the guys who raised it. John called the Capitol office and explained to my boss that I was now going to be working at the EGC.

John introduced me to the three other staffers: David Jones, Peter Maroney, and David Poger. All in their early twenties, Peter and Poger wore decked-out suits, David Jones wore jeans and a wrinkled sport coat. Instantly I picked out the real star: David Jones—Jonesy—beamed an aggressive confidence that underlined an honest, All-American quality. If David wanted to sell me a used car, I would have bought it on the spot. He was the most creative young fundraiser the party would have over the next few years, and he would lead the charge to revolutionize fundraising for Democrats.

They all gave me a quick once-over. Who was I? What was my deal? Was I some major donor’s kid in need of a job? Why was I there? I answered just as I had with O’Hanlon, and I seemed to pass muster with all of them.

O’Hanlon reemerged from his office and announced we were having a “staff meeting.” Yes! I was excited to get the feel for my new career. But when I went to grab a seat, everyone else headed toward the elevator. The elevator led us to the Dubliner, an Irish pub across from Union Station and one block from our office. This is where the EGC conducted most of its staff meetings.

Peter seemed to know every waiter and bartender. Turns out O’Hanlon had offered him a job while Peter was slinging drinks there a few months ago. Selling Guinness and selling Dick Gephardt apparently had something in common. Peter was a hustler, projecting the aura of a tough Irish intimidator, which somehow didn’t fit his twenty-one-year-old demeanor. David Poger was the village idiot. He went on and on about his latest conquest, some freshman at George Washington University he nailed the night before. Poger’s pride in his sexual prowess outweighed any talk about fundraising or politics.

Jonesy was all about the job at hand. He pestered O’Hanlon relentlessly about other folks he could call, new ways to squeeze a few bucks out from a donor here or there. “Patricof in New York, Buddy Chiles in Florida” and many more names I had never heard of. He wanted to win. So did I. But I didn’t know how, so I sat there and repeated, “How can I help?” I’d been scared of the “dirty” aspects of money in politics, but if it was helping Dick Gephardt win elections, it was becoming all right by me.

Our staff meeting ran into happy hour. Five hours and about nine beers after arriving for the 1 pm staff meeting, we parted ways. Everyone went home, except for Jonesy, who headed back to the office. They told me to show up the next morning for “normal business hours.”

3

I arrived on my first full day of work at 8 am, the “normal” time I’d arrived at the Capitol. The ECG’s door was locked. I waited, and waited. At 10:30, O’Hanlon finally emerged from the elevator.

“Wow, how long have you been waiting?”

“Oh, just a bit,” I replied, trying not to guilt him.

Jonesy, Poger, and Peter arrived a few minutes later. They put me on my first fundraising project. Peter was in charge of an event in Orlando, two weeks away. He needed to find new donors to invite in the Orlando area. To raise more money, we had to find new donors. Peter handed me a list of three hundred names, people he’d found by digging through old invite lists and campaign disclosure forms down at the Federal Election Commission, or had gotten through word of mouth. Unfortunately, there was rarely a phone number attached—on a disclosure form, donors only have to give their address and profession. My job was to call the information line and find their numbers.

I jumped right in. It was a manageable and even fulfilling task. As soon as I got a number out of the Orlando operator, I’d hand it to Peter, who’d say “Thanks, need more,” and he would call the number immediately.

“Hi, this is Peter Maroney calling from Leader Dick Gephardt’s office. Mr. Gephardt is coming to town and wants to see you at lunch. How much are you giving, and how many people can you bring?”

Meanwhile, to me Poger didn’t seem to be doing much work. He sat at his desk and read the paper, clipped his fingernails, hand-pressed any wrinkles out of his suit, and stared at the clock on the wall: Lunch would be soon, closing time not too long after that. And GW freshmen would be waiting for him after that.

I finished five hours of calls with the 407–555–1212 line in Orlando and found nearly two hundred phone numbers. Jonesy gave me another list for a New York event, and I went to work. Instead of being king of Dick Gephardt’s office foyer, I was getting tangible results for my work. Of all the jobs in politics, fundraising is the most black and white: Either you raised the money or you didn’t, either I got the phone numbers or I didn’t. I was contributing. I was helping Democrats win. If money was the means to that end, I convinced myself that raising it was okay.

For all the outgoing calls, the phone didn’t ring that much in the office. If donors called back, they knew they’d be asked for money. But one guy did call every morning for the update: Terry McAuliffe, the Macker. He was the de facto king of Democratic political money and the overlord of Gephardt’s money machine, the man Al Gore would later call the “greatest fundraiser in the history of the universe.” He’s now the governor of Virginia. It was his job to make sure O’Hanlon was closing, and often. After talking with O’Hanlon, he would ask to speak with Jonesy and Maroney. His method—love and intimidation—worked.

“Great job, Jonesy!” he’d cheer when David had hooked a new host for an event in New York. But if there were no new hosts coming from Peter, he’d explain, “You know, the first event I ever did in Orlando I raised over $50,000.” If you want to be the next Terry McAuliffe, you need to raise. Otherwise, you just aren’t that good.

As the event in Orlando approached, I was full of pride. I helped Peter, and together we helped one of my heroes, Dick Gephardt. We hadn’t sealed the deal, however. Terry was ruthless, and wanted to make sure Peter could turn commitments into checks. Terry bought Peter a one-way plane ticket to Orlando. If Peter wanted to come home on Gephardt’s dime, he’d have to fax in copies of the checks that totaled at least $25,000.

Peter flew down a week before the event to meet a few of the bigger donors, check out the lunch location, and make more calls. Making calls locally worked; folks seemed to be willing to talk with a “local” over somebody from Washington.

Two days before the event, Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida. Gephardt, not wanting to seem disrespectful of a crushed state (and its donors), pulled the plug on the trip. Fundraising right after a natural disaster wasn’t appropriate—a position I’d stick to years later with Hurricane Katrina. Hurricanes didn’t float as an excuse to Terry McAuliffe.

He called Peter. “A deal is a deal. Fax in the copies of the checks and you can come home.”

“Terry,” Peter protested, “the whole state is a disaster area. How can I ask donors for checks when they don’t even have running water?”

“I don’t care. They just better total $25,000.”

Tough-love Terry. Peter needed ten days to collect $25,000 with no event. He went door to door and told donors they still had to cut a check. I imagined Peter stepping over downed palm trees and downed power lines. When he faxed a copy of the last $1,000 check to get his total raised to $25,000, Terry was good to his word and Peter got his flight home.

This routine went on for the next few months: Pick a city, search for names, find “hosts,” send out invites, follow up with calls, make more calls, then travel to the site a few days before the event. I never saw Dick Gephardt that year after I stopped working in the Capitol. He never made one fundraising call. He didn’t have to—he was the only member of the House with a full-time team of fundraisers. He was unique. Gephardt had run for president in 1988 and had kept his money machine ready by continuing to employ staff. No other House member really had presidential timber or ambitions, so it made sense for Gephardt to have his campaign finance staff ready in case he wanted to run again. No one knew it at the time, but Dick Gephardt’s personal drive to be president had a big impact on how the role of money would fundamentally change politics over the next twenty years. With his own staff, he was setting a precedent.

As a member of the Democratic leadership, he had to raise money for his reelection, for the Effective Government Committee, and for other House Democrats. While your average incumbent Democrat in the House was raising less than $500,000 during the 1992 cycle, Dick Gephardt hauled in $3.2 million.3 Not that he needed it—he won his 1992 race by thirty-one points. But he could transfer a lot of that money to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC, the committee in charge of electing Democrats to the House), which would help other Democrats get elected. Leadership had to show the other members that they did everything they could to help Democrats win. These internal campaign fund transfers—raising money for your own campaign that you didn’t need—were limited in 1992 to only the most senior members and top party leadership. Today it is required for all members of the House Caucus. The party committees like the DCCC simply could not keep their doors open today without direct transfers from all members. No back-benching member from the 1980s would understand this. Even other high ranking members of the Democratic Caucus didn’t fund-raise aggressively. Speaker of the House Tom Foley used his wife as his fundraiser; another member of leadership, David Bonior, used Fraioli-Jost, the fundraising firm.

The Gephardt team wanted to build a national network of donors who would not only give the maximum donation of $1,000 but also would be able to raise $20,000 or $50,000 from others for the next Gephardt presidential campaign. In 1992, the thinking was that a candidate in the Democratic primary for president would need to raise $10 million to be a real player, $20 million would win the nomination. Gephardt didn’t run in ’92, but kept his team around in case he ever wanted to again. So his team built the list of three or four big donors in every major fundraising market: New York, Boston, Florida, Chicago, Los Angeles, Texas, and Philadelphia. Each city had a top donor: Ben Barnes in Austin, Boston was Steven Grossman or Arnold Hiatt, Chicago was Don Sussman, and so on. It was rare for a national politician like Gephardt to make “the ask” for a contribution from these individuals, so when Gephardt came to their city once or twice a year, getting them to write a check was an easy lift.

It was clear why these donors wanted to stay on Gephardt’s good side: to enjoy the perks of the White House in a Gephardt presidency. Dick was still tops on the list of presidential candidates, and when his fundraiser called, it was important to be supportive if a donor wanted to serve in his administration or become an ambassador. That was the hook. Top donors in each city would raise money for a prospective presidential candidate from smaller donors, who’d give once the top donor asked. For the handful of Democrats who wanted to be president, it was easy: All they had to do was keep three or four people in each city engaged, and they would do the rest of the work for you. In 1992, if you had fifty of these folks around the country, you had a healthy national fundraising strategy.

This all changed in the next three years. Raising money nationally became no longer about presidential ambition but about members of the House and Senate (with no presidential ambition) raising money by pitching congressional legislation and picking political fights. That’s a very different sell to donors. With an explosion of the number of members raising money, more and more donors around the country had to be found to fund them. In 1992, you would be hard-pressed to name the top five Democratic donors in Boston; by 2012, there would be over fifty well-known top targets.

Over the next few years, as Gephardt and his House leadership team forced average House back-benchers to raise money from a national donor network, the party was slowly taken over by the need to keep these individual donors happy. One or two phone calls a year from Dick Gephardt or a senator in leadership like Tom Daschle (D-SD) became one or two a week from some House or Senate Committee chairman. That call schedule takes up members’ most in-demand quantity: time.

4

As the 1992 election approached, a strong feeling developed among Democrats that Bill Clinton might actually win. It had been sixteen years since Jimmy Carter had won the presidential election in 1976, and Democrats had forgotten what holding power was like. With victory almost in hand, Gephardt didn’t fund-raise much those last few weeks before the election. Work slowed down at the Gephardt money machine, but we did maintain our daily liquid-infused staff meetings.

The Friday before the election, O’Hanlon and Gephardt’s Hill staff decided to dump all the cash out of the Effective Government Committee PAC accounts and spread it around to any and all Democrats running. It was why the EGC existed in the first place. Gephardt had started traveling around the country with John O’Hanlon, David Jones, and Peter Maroney to raise money for several different accounts: for “Gephardt in Congress,” his official campaign account: for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): and for his political action committee, the EGC, which could also be used to pay campaign staff salaries and travel costs. “Leadership” PACs in 1992 matched the title: Members of a party’s leadership had them, but the average back-bench member did not. Today, 90 percent of members in both parties have at least one leadership PAC, yet the leadership in the House is still the same number: four. I guess money makes everybody a leader.

He gave away the EGC’s money to “buy” loyalty from members of the Democratic Caucus. If another member ever challenged him for leadership of House Democrats, Dick could easily remind the Democratic members of Congress, the voters in leadership races, that he had given them money. With campaigns running about $425,000 on average, that $5,000 or $10,000 from Gephardt was not insignificant. And if a candidate lost by a few hundred votes and Gephardt—or anyone else with a PAC—had not helped them and yet had cash available, that would be hard to explain, if not plain embarrassing, to the other members in the Democratic Caucus. This was the ultimate, legal way to instill loyalty from members: Handing them cash would make it hard for them to vote against you for Speaker, leader, or whip. If you ever had a real internal campaign for leadership, no question that the member-candidate that delivers the most money will always win.

In the middle of September of 1992, our office got a call from one of the postal workers’ unions with a simple offer: They had $100,000 left to give from their PAC but wanted to give that money to incumbents who really needed it. O’Hanlon and the others gathered the names and sent the list, via fax machine, over to the Rural Letter Carriers of America. About two days later, the stack of fifty checks arrived to the office, some made out for $1,000, some for $5,000, and addressed to individual members. O’Hanlon told me to take that stack up to Steve Elmendorf in the Capitol. I was opposed to the thought of distributing political money in the Capitol, but I would do the job I was handed.

I watched as Steve ran the few feet from Gephardt’s office and tried to track down every member he had a check for. Classic. He was currying favor for himself with each and every member he handed a check to, though he had done nothing to raise the money.

The hypocrisy of the moment was not lost on me a few years later when John Boehner (R-OH), today the Speaker of the House, went to give a few checks out to Republican members on the House floor, and Steve Elmendorf went batshit crazy. My money is cleaner than yours, that’s the Democratic motto.

A few days before the election, another list came in, this one from Gephardt’s Capitol office. One hundred seventy-seven candidates for Congress needed to get checks ASAP or they couldn’t use the money before election day. Buying loyalty was in overdrive. We too went into overdrive to assemble 177 donation packets in just a couple of hours. We split up assignments. I would print the letters for each candidate, Jonesy would write the checks, O’Hanlon would forge Gephardt’s signature, Maroney would call the candidates to tell them the checks were coming, and Poger would fill out the FedEx forms. We had four hours before the 5 pm FedEx cutoff.

I stacked the letters on O’Hanlon’s desk as they came off the printer, and O’Hanlon got to signing “Dick” on each note to a candidate that would accompany the check. Jonesy hand-printed the campaign committee names on checks: “Clyburn for South Carolina, People for Waxman in California,” and so on. I would grab the note from O’Hanlon, attach the corresponding check, and hand it to Poger to be placed in the matching FedEx envelope.

At 4:55 pm the FedEx guy arrived just as we sealed the last of the 177 envelopes. He gave them a quick once-over, then looked at O’Hanlon with a puzzled expression. “Let me get this straight: You guys want to send these 177 envelopes right back to this office?”

Poger had pulled a Poger. He had spent four hours writing our office address in the “TO” box on all 177 forms. We didn’t have time to meet the FedEx deadline that night, so we came back on Monday and redid all the packages for Tuesday delivery, the day of the election.

5

The Clinton/Gore team had the cream of the fundraising crop in 1992; presidential campaigns always do. Clinton raised $62 million in 1992, a 20 percent increase over Mike Dukakis in 1988. That’s where the real action was—if you wanted to be in the big leagues, you raised money for the presidential campaign. Gephardt had his team, and a few other small fundraising shops existed around town, but the talent pool—maybe twenty full-time fundraisers in 1992—was thin.

After the election, members of the Clinton money team started getting important jobs: Rahm Emanuel would go to the White House as an advisor, Terry McAuliffe somehow got himself an ambassadorship (to the Taejon Expo in South Korea, whatever that is), and other fundraisers would jump onto the transition team and broker themselves a gig. That meant the Inaugural Committee was short fundraisers. And it needed money, for the parade, for balls, and for food . . . and to entertain all the big-name stars coming to town.

Since I really had not been a fundraiser, I didn’t want to go to the Inaugural Committee and make calls—I had no confidence I could ask someone for $5,000 or $10,000. So I went off to work for the “talent team,” which meant we would pamper the visiting Hollywood and music stars. I’ve never been a star fucker, at least for Hollywood types. My stars were members of Congress, but I would do my job for President-Elect Clinton.

Jonesy stayed with Gephardt to handle donor requests for the inauguration. Maroney got a new job as Congressman Joe Kennedy’s full-time fundraiser. Joe wanted to be governor of Massachusetts and wanted a piece of the only Democratic fundraising pros outside of Clinton’s world, the Gephardt team. Poger went to raise money full time for the Inaugural Committee.

The Inaugural Committee didn’t know about Poger’s FedEx problem, but he’d screw things up soon enough. I stopped by the fundraising side of the committee one morning and overheard Poger making a grease-ball pitch to a donor on the phone.

“Beth, I just got off the phone with the president-elect, and he asked me—personally—to call you and request $5,000 for the Inauguration Committee. I would love nothing more than to call him back and tell him that you’re sending in that check. Can I do that?”

Utter bullshit. To think Bill Clinton had called Poger to discuss specific donors is beyond fantasy. But Poger probably saw himself hanging out in Georgetown bars dropping the same line: “I just got off the phone with President-Elect Bill Clinton . . . and he thinks you should sleep with me.”

Unfortunately for Poger, he had just pitched Beth Dozoretz. Beth was very close to the Clinton family, so close that she could pick up the phone and talk to Bill or Hillary, which she did. Terry McAuliffe heard about the call, lit into Poger, and put him in the doghouse for the rest of the inaugural.

Meanwhile, those of us on the talent committee ran around DC blocking off hotel floors for the big stars: Barbra Streisand to the Mayflower, Billy Crystal to the Jefferson, and so on. We had over a hundred performers appearing at different inaugural events. All of them needed hotels, pampering, and more. As it would play out over the next fifteen years, involving Hollywood stars in Democratic politics would prove to be a massive time suck, as staff and elected officials routinely spend too much time coddling large egos when they should be doing better things, like running the country.

Six days before the inaugural, the talent committee assembled in the basement of our headquarters, where we’d be assigned our talent for the week. The big names were already gobbled up by the top staff, but we put the B-list stars in a hat to be assigned lottery style. I was excited. Maybe I’d get Fleetwood Mac? Chevy Chase? But when I saw my sheet of paper, I should have taken it as a sign to get out of politics.

I would spend the next six days driving around the Manhattan Transfer in a van to events, dinners, museums, and more. Yep. And they would practice singing nonstop in that van. I shudder every time someone mentions that band today.

My dislike for Hollywood types started with Billy Crystal. The day before the inauguration, we were hosting a presidential gala out at the Capital Centre, the sports complex about ten miles from DC, where the Bullets and Capitals played. Crystal was slated to MC the night, and Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Robin Williams, and Chevy Chase would all perform. It would be a full-on liberal coronation love-fest.

But there was one major hiccup. Billy Crystal refused to take a limo; he would only take a helicopter. Seriously. Members of Congress, senators, governors, foreign leaders, and every other performer would all happily ride the ten miles in a limo, but not Billy. The inaugural scrambled and worked with the Secret Service—this is DC, after all—and arranged for his solo ride in the helicopter.

6

DC was in the midst of a Democratic honeymoon in January of 1993. The White House and both houses of Congress had Democrats controlling them. Bill Clinton was President, Tom Foley was Speaker of the House, and George Mitchell was Senate majority leader. Congressional fundraising remained part time, as the anti–Keating Five culture still hung heavy over the Capitol. Almost no members had a full-time fundraising staff yet. Why pay a fundraiser a salary and benefits a full two years before the next election?

The Gephardt money machine nearly closed down after the election of 1992. With Clinton in the White House, Dick’s next chance to run for president was at least four, but more likely eight, years away. And Gephardt could easily raise enough by himself to win his next House election. But Gephardt recognized talent and wanted to keep David Jones around just in case. So Dick kept Jonesy on as his only fundraiser. Meanwhile, Poger was still in the woodshed for his call to Beth Dozoretz. Maroney was gearing up Joe Kennedy to run for Massachusetts governor. John O’Hanlon went into making money and became a lobbyist.

I was in limbo for only a few days. Fundraisers with talent and political connections went into the administration. Beyond that, the Democratic National Committee held the only real promise for a fundraiser’s next job. McAuliffe called the new finance director (the DNC’s top fundraiser and a job I’d hold by 2005), Nancy Jacobson, and told her to hire me. Getting me a job was a win-win for Terry: He built my loyalty to him, and Nancy was happy to have one of Gephardt’s renowned money team on board. Nancy had been raising money for national Democrats for a few years, having worked for Senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Al Gore (D-TN) previously. Today Nancy runs a group called “No Labels,” a centrist group that is supposed to be about “fixing” partisan politics. Of course, Nancy was a leader in creating the partisan money game in 1993.

January 25, just five days after the inaugural, and the DNC’s new fundraisers arrived at the third floor of the DNC building. It was a dingy, smelly office with disgusting, stained green carpet. The office fell far short of the new standards in campaign cash. Now that Bill Clinton was in the White House, the role of money in politics was changing. All of a sudden, the memory of the Keating Five scandal faded fast, and the era of soft money—unlimited amounts that could be given to party committees in support of loosely defined party-building activities—was dawning. It was morning in America for those who could write six-figure checks, and Nancy Jacobson was determined to make it rain.

The last time Democrats controlled all three branches of elected government—House, Senate, White House—had been 1977. No one understood, or cared, how such absolute control of the legislative process could translate into political money. Democrats’ grip on power meant special interest groups would need to shower Democrats with money to move any nonessential bill through Washington. If a Nancy Jacobson or a Terry McAuliffe did not approve of you, or if you had not done enough for them, you got nothing. Nancy or Terry would just deny you access, and they’d never tell you about the potential access you were being denied. It was a new day.

But most of the party—except for a few other big players—didn’t understand that Nancy and Terry were opening the floodgates, and it showed. The Clinton team installed David Wilhelm as the DNC chair, a young Chicago hack from the campaign, but he was not ready for a high-pressure role. Few, for that matter, were.

Combine a disgusting office, a weak DNC chair, and Nancy’s desire to raise more money—hard and soft—than ever before, and guess what? The fundraisers took control and moved out of the DNC’s offices. Nancy didn’t tell anybody, not even Chairman Wilhelm. She found office space next to the White House, above the Old Ebbitt Grill on 15th Street. Donors could see the White House front lawn from its windows. It was the ultimate shake-down shuffle: If you want to get into the White House, I am your point of access. Pony up.

However, because this move was done on such short notice and without the “approval” of the rest of the DNC, Nancy had to choose office space that was not ideal. We shared space—down to the receptionist—with a law firm called Tanaka-O’Leary. In those first few months of the new DNC finance operation, when a donor returned a call they would hear “Tanaka-O’Leary, Democratic National Committee, how may I direct your call?”

It might seem like a small, subtle move for the DNC finance team to end up next to the White House, but it was the coronation of the new world. Policy and money are related. The statement wasn’t aimed at traditional DC donors, like lobbyists and PAC directors. Rather, it was aimed at wealthier donors around the country, rich individuals who wanted to be involved and would be impressed by the DNC’s proximity to the new president.

In the past, these folks would attend that one big Democratic fundraising event in their city every year. Since Democrats had not occupied the White House since 1980, the small donor community of the very wealthy had been connected to DC only through their home state members of the House and Senate to whom they donated in the final few months of the campaign. New York donors gave to Senator Pat Moynihan, Californians to Alan Cranston, and Ohioans to John Glenn. When those donors came to DC, they would come see their senator and maybe big players like Dick Gephardt, Representative Vic Fazio (D-CA), or Speaker Foley over in the House.

Nancy had sent an important signal that that relationship was changing. If you want to get into the White House, you must stop to get credentials next door at the DNC finance office. In just a few short months, a few elite rich people would begin to dictate which concerns Democrats cared about and how much time the party’s elected officials spent kissing their asses, all because of the structure and rules that fundraisers like Nancy put in place. This new group of donors would be heavily associated with President Bill Clinton, and they would remain organized through his and Hillary Clinton’s efforts for the next few years.

Then there is another level of donor, a level occupied by a very small handful of liberal elite donors. Billionaires. They participated some but never loved the Clinton operation. He was too moderate, too centrist. After losing the White House in 2000 and with the McCain-Feingold caps on soft money in 2002, they would take over the party by going around it. Keep reading.

7

The DNC’s new fundraising team had no idea what it was doing. We would sit in the mahogany-paneled conference room of our subleased law firm office every morning at 8 am. Fifteen of us, not one over the age of twenty-five, including Nancy. Some of our staff was not in DC. Our Los Angeles fundraiser was dating actress Dana Delaney, and Dana would join our morning staff meeting over the phone.

Unlike past presidents, Bill Clinton immediately offered his time to the DNC for a few big events. The 1993–1994 cycle saw the first full-time national committee fundraising operation.

During the last presidential campaign, the DNC had raised $8 million. With soft money now in vogue, this team of green, pimply fundraisers had been charged with raising over $50 million. Peter O’Keeffe, Erica Payne, Hannah Simone, Kimball Stroud, and others had to find a way to make it happen.

Mind you, I had yet to make a fundraising call in my life, but I was a full-time paid fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.

We assigned staff to each upcoming event. I would go off to New York with three others to plan a big Radio City Music Hall evening with Barry Manilow. I went with the flow. It was thrilling: twenty-three years old and working an “important” job for the DNC or, as we would say, “working for the President of the United States.” We got free rooms at the Loews Hotel on Madison Avenue, which became my home until I flamed out a few weeks later.

We went over to Radio City and discussed the seating charts. Five thousand seats in all, and we’d be generous enough to sell the balcony for $100 per seat. This was part of the new fundraising optics: The DNC could defend taking large checks by pointing to the vast number of small checks it also received. We could point at the balcony and say, “We are the party of little people!”

That left three thousand seats for the best (richest) Democrats in New York. The front two hundred seats would go for $25,000 a pair and include backstage passes to hang out with President Clinton. The next slice of seats went for a $15,000 donation (but no presidential hangout), then $10,000, $5,000, $2,500, and $1,000. If we sold out, the evening would raise over $10 million for the DNC, which would be a record. It proved too much to handle. They never could sell the tickets and moved the event to a more manageable location with fewer seats, Lincoln Center.

This was the problem with starting the race for dollars so early in the election cycle. It’s about the timing. The next election was so far away, and a pitch focused solely on winning the next election didn’t go over well because donors felt tapped out from trying to win the one that just happened. So fundraisers began to divide the class of wealthy donors into two groups—“regular” rich people who might have other priorities for their money and a class of a select few very wealthy individuals who would automatically write checks because they had too much money to know what to do with it. This elite network of donors who could write $100,000 in soft-money checks without blinking started with these types of events in the spring of 1993.

It changed how politicians talked and acted toward donors. Before, a politician asked for a check because it made the difference between winning and losing. Raising so much money so early from the wealthy elite changed what the donor got in return. Making a call to a donor six weeks before the election took only a few minutes on the phone and was accompanied by a simple ask: “Please donate so I can win.” Getting the elite donor class to pony up twenty-four months before the election meant coddling them, spending time with them, and giving them access.

Elections and fundraising were seasonal prior to 1993. Since then, they have been year-round.

We divided up the Clinton/Gore and Inaugural Committee donors. All I had to do was raise $3.3 million and some change . . . more money than I could possibly imagine. But I was representing the President of the United States; how could a donor say no to that and an evening with Barry Manilow? My list had some heavy hitters: VPs at Goldman Sachs, Lazard Frères, Dime Bank, JP Morgan, and the like . . . a who’s who of Wall Street Democrats, folks who made more in one day than I did in a year. I would never have anything in common with them, but my job was to raise and raise.

I started with donors who had written checks of $25,000 or more in a combination of hard and soft money. My very first donor meeting was with an investment banker. We had a superficial conversation, where a guy in his fifties pretends to care about a twenty-three-year-old kid in a cheap suit who was about to beg for a check. Except I never got the chance to beg. He complained about all the money he’d given and said he needed a break. To my own amazement, I agreed. Twenty-five grand is a lot of money, and what right did I have to ask him for so much again just a month after the inauguration? Donors had always had a honeymoon after the election, and I wanted to respect that tradition. That break does not exist anymore.

But I felt that our fake conversation might just have built a bond between us. Confident he would give that $25,000 before the event—I had two months still to work on him—I did what I thought a fundraiser did: I marked him down on the commitment sheet for $25,000. I had never asked him for the money, he had never offered, but I was confident.

I had fifteen meetings that first week. I was traipsing around New York, sitting down with the richest of the rich and talking presidential politics. I was king of the hill . . . for a day or two. But then the script of my first meeting repeated itself all over town. Everyone was tapped out from the campaign and the inauguration. I didn’t put in a single ask for money. And that’s the critical part: Fundraisers don’t raise money unless they ask for it, and for a specific amount. At that point in my career, I just assumed donors would give sooner or later. I marked down each donor for the amount they’d given previously, without a single actual commitment. I sent my list of “commitments” at the end of that first week in New York to Nancy. My total was $375,000.

One of my last meetings that week was with what I would come to know as a “donor fake,” a David Poger in reverse: a donor who bullshitted as well as a fundraiser and would never write a check. As fundraising exploded between 1993 and 1995, donor fakes would become more common. They’re a double whammy: Not only do they fail to cough up enough money, they demand more and more time from the politician, who usually believes a large check is around the corner with just a little more work. Hollywood types are the worst donor fakes. And fundraisers, like me, would buy into this false hope and allow politicians to continue coddling them.

David Bender was my first donor fake. My list didn’t have a dollar amount next to his name, but he was still high up near the top: #44 out of 500. Since the list seemed to go by dollar amounts, with the biggest donor at the top, he had to be big time.

His assistant answered the phone, “Please hold for Mr. Bender.”

A minute later, Bender picked up. “Lindsay, how are you doing? I would love to talk about this event! Perhaps you could come to my office and we could go to lunch?”

Something was off. Mr. Bender sure sounded a lot like his assistant. I didn’t care, I had a new “whale.” I walked over to his office in Midtown Manhattan. It wasn’t really an office building, it was an old apartment block. I didn’t pay much attention; in New York lots of offices were in apartments. I buzzed up, and Mr. Bender’s assistant answered.

“Please come up, Mr. Bender will see you now.”

It was the smallest studio apartment I’ve ever seen, maybe two hundred square feet, with a couch that doubled as a bed, a TV, a coffeemaker, a hot plate, a bookcase, and a toilet. No closet. No bathroom. No shower. It was hard to find a seat.

We talked about President Clinton and all Mr. Bender had done to help, which sounded like not much, frankly. I really wanted to ask where his assistant was. It was killing me. Was he under the toilet? Maybe outside on the window ledge? David had a deal for me, for the president, Nancy Jacobson, and the Democratic Party. He opened a little box on his floor and pulled out a plate, a plate stamped with a picture of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the presidential seal.

“Why are you showing me these, David?”

“Lindsay, if you really want to raise a ton of money, and I mean a ton, and if Nancy does too, these plates are the ticket. You should offer them as gifts to your top donors.”

“Well, I’m not—” I started to reply.

“Just think about it,” he cut me off. “I have a dealer who can score these sweet babies for us for $14.95 a plate and maybe get us a bulk discount!”

My new pitch was obvious: Give the DNC $25,000 and you too can eat a turkey sandwich on Bill Clinton’s face! I was desperate to escape. Now, it was 1993, so I didn’t have a cell phone, and I didn’t carry a pager. I had no way out of Bender’s shoebox studio, and we still had to go to lunch.

“That’s great, David, I think everybody at Goldman Sachs will want those in their homes!”

We walked to the Russian Tea Room. At least he had some class, and I could only assume his assistant had made the reservation. Actor/comedian Alan King came in a few minutes after us. David yelled at him. Alan gave the what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-here-and-no-I-am-not-your-friend wave back. “Hi, David.” He kept moving.

After an excruciating hour, the check came. And it sat on the table, just staring at us. I got the message and hoped I had enough money in my account to cover it. I walked back to the hotel with tears of laughter streaming down my face. I marked him down for $25,000. Why not?

I kept sending Nancy the list of “commitments.” I was rocking out. By the end of the second week, I had over $1.2 million on paper. Nobody else in that office had more than $100,000. Suckers. Then my house of cards crashed down. Nancy picked up the phone to thank the donors. The calls did not go too well. Not one of those nice people I had spent time chitchatting with, bonding with, being friendly with, “working,” would confirm they had committed. Not one.

Nancy gave me my last paycheck and had me on the next train back to DC. I had managed to work a total of one month for the DNC.

8

I didn’t like fundraising. Although I had a good time those few months with John O’Hanlon, David Jones, Peter Maroney, and Poger. If I wanted to make a difference in the world, it was becoming clear that fundraising wasn’t the way. How could I help the underserved if I was begging rich folks all day? Maybe I could get a new job on the Hill doing some policy work? Fundraisers had no say in policy. At least that was the case in early 1993.

David Jones called. He had heard about my great Democratic National Committee fundraising success, but he “still believed in me.” That meant he could get me cheap, as his assistant for the revamped Gephardt money machine, which he led. I should have said no. But I needed a paycheck, and he could get me $18,000 a year.

Since the downsizing of the Gephardt fundraising office, Jonesy had moved the operation to a little basement on Capitol Court NE near Union Station. It was a dark, dank office, but it would be the home of the Gephardt money machine for the next two years. Gephardt didn’t need the full-time fundraiser operation he had had before, since the White House was occupied by a Democrat and Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. Fundraising in 1993 didn’t require attention or work. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Democrats held all the levers of power, so money would begin to flow in naturally, even to fundraisers like me.

David was hard-edged New Jersey all the way. He understood the money game. And he understood how to game the game. One of my first days in the office, I sat in awe as I listened to Jonesy berate some poor Verizon phone representative for over an hour. Jonesy wanted to change our office number, which began with a 636 extension. He wanted one that started with 225, same as the U.S. Capitol exchange. Caller ID was becoming more popular, and he wanted donors to think he was calling from an office in Congress. His message was simple: I’m close to power. Brilliant.

Verizon said no.

The routine hadn’t changed: Raising money meant finding new donors. We’d cull through lists of people who’d given to Gephardt before or pick up new names from other fundraisers at the DNC (and the list of names I had stolen on my way out the door at the DNC), or go down to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and tear through disclosure forms for people who’d given to other Democrats. Then I’d call the information line to track down their numbers. We needed as many leads as possible to make the biggest possible target list. That was key: The more names, the less worry when somebody said no.

The closing rate for political fundraising is around 2 percent. Call one hundred people, two will say yes. Send one thousand letters asking donors to host an event, twenty—with a follow-up call—will say yes. Recruiting hosts is how to raise more money and increase attendance. Hosts agreed to raise or write $1,000, $2,500, or $5,000. We’d set different levels for hosting; maybe a gold host would be $5,000, silver $2,500, and bronze $1,000. Since the individual giving limit in 1993 was $1,000 (in 2014, it’s $2,600), the idea was to get people to raise more money for us from their friends and colleagues after they’d given all they could. We’d tell them to ask their spouses, coworkers, neighbors, anyone. When hosts recruited new donors, we’d add them to our database, expanding our universe. We called them hosts to make them feel important: They’d be listed on the invite as a friend and supporter of Dick Gephardt, and we’d send the invite to thousands of people. Woo hoo.

Floyd Stoner was the head lobbyist of the American Bankers Association. He called me back in response to one of the host letters he had received and talked to me for over thirty minutes. He was a nice guy and I enjoyed talking with someone who seemed to be important. He wanted me—and thus Mr. Gephardt—to know that he was happy to contribute the maximum of $5,000 from the American Bankers PAC but that he could not be listed as a host. His excuse? The association didn’t want to be seen as helping Democrats publicly. Sure the donation would show up on the FEC report, but he did not want his name floating around DC as being a big supporter of Democrats.

When we had stopped fishing for hosts and printed the invites, we would code each invite and send ten or twenty extras to each host. John Boland, for example, would receive twenty invites to pass out to his friends and colleagues with a little “JB” in the corner. When someone sent in a check on a “JB” RSVP, we knew whom to credit. That was 1993. Today, when so much money is raised online, there’s usually a box on the Web page that asks donors to name the host who referred them.

Meanwhile, a political action committee could give $5,000. PACs are funded by many smaller contributions from individual union members or company employees, all in the name of spreading the respective organization’s influence. It is average people’s money. They give to the PAC run by their company or union, which bundles it together and donates it to make a large impression on behalf of the PAC’s parent organization. But the higher limit meant PAC directors of all stripes jumped at being hosts. All they had to do was write a check funded by other peoples’ money, and not spend time recruiting others. And, of course, they didn’t have to write a personal check themselves.

With a bigger check, PACs had outsize influence but it was easier money for me to raise. All I had to do was reach out to a PAC director once: one call, one check, done. I didn’t have to spend time with them, I didn’t have to beg them with weekly calls. Best of all, in 1993, Gephardt never had to spend time calling them.

Then there were independent lobbyist firms. They had PACs too. Since access was their stock and trade, they were a little stingier with the automatic “yes.” They wanted more coddling, more time with the member so they could brag to clients about their relationships. If a hired K Street lobbyist agreed to be a gold host for $5,000, I had to stay on top of them, work them, make sure they got the attention they needed to send in that $5,000. If they could only write $1,000, they had to find another $4,000, and I had to motivate them to do that. Maybe a little time with the chief of staff would motivate you to produce? Or how about we send you one of those flags that flew over the Capitol? It was a constant battle to entice these people.

If after all that special attention you still did not produce all the money you said you would, we’d put you on the deadbeat list. Mr. Gephardt would hear about the deadbeats. And we made sure everybody knew when we would send him the list. In truth, Gephardt never cared, but we fundraisers wanted the donor community to think he did.

At first, donors thought we were joking. But as political money grew in importance, so did the list. It began to inspire fear. To avoid being on this list, lobbyists and donors would create reasons to get us even more money to be sure they’d never get anywhere near it. Soon lobbyists’ kids started opening checking accounts to funnel us money. We’d get $1,000 from Lobbyist Smith, but Lobbyist Smith’s five-year-old daughter gave too . . . just to stay off the deadbeat list.

Then lobbyists became desperate to claim credit for as many donations as possible. If the Trial Attorneys’ PAC gave $5,000 to host an event, within hours I would get calls from every outside lobbyist who ever worked for the trial attorneys taking credit for the check. I’d pass Tommy Boggs on the street, one of the most successful lobbyists in town, and he’d yell out that he had gotten that $5,000 check for us. All you could do was feign a weak “thank you.”

We loved the extra money, but I hated the ass-kissing. We decided donors had to actually hand-deliver us the check or we would not credit them. Deadbeats be beaten! David Jones drew a line in the sand, and taking credit for the money had become important. The fundraiser’s power was on the rise.

We’d start planning for the big events about six weeks beforehand. We knew we could only count on five or six days of fundraising time with Mr. Gephardt in 1993, so we had a short window to raise enough money to justify our salaries and employment. That seemed okay to me: With lots of people at a big event, no one would have too much time to lobby him about any one issue. Except for those couple events, we never saw Gephardt that year. He never made fundraising calls. He didn’t visit our Capitol Court basement. He was busy working as majority leader in the House.

After President Clinton asked California congressman Leon Panetta to join his cabinet, Gephardt took a trip out west to campaign for Panetta’s replacement in a special election. We decided to tack on an LA fundraising event. David was given two months to raise some money. We came up with about 2,500 possible hosts, printed letters, and forged Gephardt’s signature. After dropping them in the mail and waiting a few days, David called them all, then he called again. And again. I culled for more names, spending hours at the FEC looking for any donor who had written $500 or more in Los Angeles. It was eye popping. As I read through various FEC filings, I got to understand different donor profiles: lots of “homemakers” (a term all fundraisers used when a donation disclosure form had to be filled out and we didn’t know a woman’s profession), lots of lawyers, few business executives, but very few Hollywood types. Actor Ed Asner showed up here and there with $250 contributions, but that was about it. In those days, Hollywood liked to show up, but never gave much money.

David was a closer; he relished calling folks for money. By the end of week one, he had over thirty hosts. By week two, he had over fifty. Then he called every Democratic member of Congress in the LA area and asked them to be “honorary hosts” of the event, which just meant we could list them on the invite. Most wouldn’t event show, but donors didn’t need to know that.

Three weeks out from the event, David flew to LA so he could work donors on the ground. I stayed in DC to design the invitation, get it printed, and mail it to five thousand people, including twenty to each host so they could invite their friends. Not one of them had ever spoken to Dick Gephardt, but that didn’t matter; getting thirty seconds with him was enough to fork over $1,000.

David had failed to switch our phone exchange, but he was not done insinuating our relationship with the Capitol. We designed the invitation with a gold dome in the Capitol’s shape. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like official correspondence from the U.S. Congress. That was the point: If you wanted to be near the action in Congress, money is the way to do it.

I double-checked the names and made sure I had everybody listed and took the invite over to the printer to get five thousand invitations. I sent them out. David called me two days later. “Love you, man, but you fucked up. You misspelled Congressman Xavier Becerra’s name.” Damn. I was the worst fundraiser ever. In hindsight, I wish I’d been fired.

We used only two of the five offices in that basement, so we rented one to Peter Maroney, now Congressman Joe Kennedy’s full-time moneyman. Outside of Gephardt, the only full-time non-DNC fundraisers worked for Ted and Joe Kennedy. A new breed was popping up, as the handful of fundraisers around town realized that they could strike out on their own and sign House candidates—often gullible long shots who didn’t know any donors and needed to hire people who did. With campaign budgets well under $500,000, candidates needed to know the labor leaders and individuals in their districts; that was more than enough to hit their campaign’s fundraising targets.

Enter Bruce Keiloch. He was friends with Jonesy though I never knew what they had in common. Bruce was in his late twenties, with smelly, nappy dreadlocks down to his waist. Bruce was a member of the new fundraising consultant class, and his client list showed it: long shots who didn’t know they didn’t need him, like a candidate for Congress in Chicago who was living in Cabrini Greens—the infamous housing project—who spent most of her campaign funds on new hats. This is how the industry grew—by preying on clients who could be convinced they needed a fundraiser. Jonesy rented the last office to Bruce.

The four of us set up our shops in that basement. Everybody made calls, set up events, tracked down new donors. Then things got punchy. Bruce and Peter had a love-hate relationship. Peter was most excited about his newfound ease in picking up young women. It was one thing to show up in a bar and flash a “Congressman Richard A. Gephardt” business card; the average college sophomore had no idea who he was. But business cards bearing the Kennedy name put Peter in sexual conquest heaven.

I am pretty sure Bruce was in unrequited love with Peter. Bruce often gave Peter rides home. Peter wanted to live close to Georgetown and its students. Bruce and Peter got into some argument in the car and Bruce very maturely blasted the Dead Kennedys on the stereo in response. Peter demanded Bruce pull over, and he jumped out of the car on Rock Creek Parkway. These were the new stars of Democratic fundraising.

Our routine continued for the next year and half. Events in DC, New York, California, Vegas, Chicago, Florida, all in the same mode: maybe once every month or two, with no committed time from Gephardt to make calls. Assemble donors, find phone numbers, mail host invites, follow up, confirm hosts, follow up. Call. Call again. Expand the universe of people who could give us money. Rinse. Repeat. Monotony set in. My office was filled with trash, trash from reams of paper listing names, forgotten invitations, and, at times, piles of checks. David and I both got fat over the next eighteen months—we ate McDonald’s breakfasts most mornings to put off making calls.

Fundraisers were still viewed as seedy characters. Very few politicians truly understood what we did or how we could be used to their benefit. With most members of Congress sticking to only one or two events a year, they had no use for full-time fundraisers. The path to a rich lobbying gig on K Street was still as a subject area expert in a congressional office, not as a fundraiser like so many today. Those lobbyists knew the legislative process, and that was what your clients paid for. Fundraising was just a sideshow.

Fraioli-Jost’s business model was under threat. Campaign budgets were creeping up. Members of Congress needed to lavish more attention on more donors; the one or two big cattle-call events a year wouldn’t cut it anymore. The emerging class of fundraising consultants was beginning to have success picking up new clients: a member here, a challenger there, maybe even a senator. Fundraisers were beginning to convince politicians that money would win elections and, of course, pay their own salaries. The new fundraising consultants concentrated on just one or two clients, which meant they could be more attentive, both to them and to the expanding class of high-maintenance donors they were creating.

9

I wanted out, but I had no clue what I’d do for a living. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that I was helping the president, Leader Gephardt, or any other Democrat by raising money, I knew I was corrupting the political process, one check at a time. I had to get out of fundraising and find another way to make the world a better place.

In 1994, I announced I was running for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 39, a new seat carved out after the 1990 census. The district was way out in Germantown, Maryland, a very long way from the Capitol. Since I didn’t live anywhere close to Germantown, I had to rent a tiny apartment to comply with the law. I furnished it with a TV, bed, and chair. It was home, sort of. With no money to my name, I had to keep my day job working for Gephardt. The commute was a killer, but elected office was my chance to make a difference.

In an article with the Frederick News, I focused on keeping government pure:

Mr. Lewis was critical of incumbent lawmakers who, in his words, needed tougher public ethics laws. He said he would refuse all lobbyists’ gifts, regardless of their value, and would push for new ethics laws . . . [so] that “the public does have full disclosure between representatives of the people and representatives of special interests.”

A little ironic that I spent my day raising money from DC lobbyists and yet attacked them at night. Jonesy made calls for me. I held my first fundraising event at the infamous Hawk ’n’ Dove on Capitol Hill. Terry McAuliffe came, as did other friends of Gephardt. I raised $10,000 that night, including $4,000 from Sunkist Growers of California. Not that they had much interest in District 39 in Maryland; they cared that David Jones, Dick Gephardt’s chief fundraiser, had called them.

I organized weekend get-out-the-votes and invited my new fundraising and lobbyist friends from DC to help. My friends Kate Moss, Kimball Stroud, and David Jones all came out and knocked on doors for me. At the height of the campaign, I had over twenty DC power brokers wearing my T-shirt and knocking on doors. Although my campaign had no real message beyond vague promises of change, they did their best. Unfortunately, the most common response my powerful door knockers got from voters was, “I met her last week, I like her.” They didn’t even know I was a man.

I came in fourth in the primary, with 8 percent of the vote. But I still was the only person to get $4,000 from the Sunkist Growers!

10

It was 1994, and the campaign finance world was about to change dramatically. All the fundraising innovations after the 1992 election would seem like child’s play compared to what was about to happen. Newt Gingrich had signed a contract with America, and his band of Republicans was taking over Washington. Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives since the 1950s, but no more.

The summer of 1994 had been tough on Democrats. The first eighteen months of legislative pushes from President Clinton had taken a political toll. Carbon tax, gays in the military, the assault rifle ban, and health care reform had been tough votes, and they essentially forced many moderate Southern House Democrats to retire from Congress: Over fifty announced they would not be running for reelection. This stretched the party’s limited resources—incumbents could raise money easily (they control power), but challengers always have a tougher time.

It was clear to anybody really paying attention that it was going to be a bloodbath on election day. Over forty years in charge of the House had made many in the party too comfortable. Sure, maybe we might lose a few seats, the thinking went, but it will still be a Democratic majority.

I got a call from David Jones on the Friday before the election. He was in St. Louis with Gephardt trying to raise some last-minute money. He gave me a task: Track down weekend phone numbers for George Soros and Arnold Hiatt, two mega-donors. Gephardt and Senator Tom Daschle had panicked, and both decided they would come up with $1 million each, $2 million total, to try to save the majority.

It was wrong on so many levels to me. How could you spend that money in the closing days? TV advertising time would be reserved already, and it was too late to design and send direct mail. Maybe we could set up some phone banks, but we couldn’t find enough callers in America to make $2 million worth of calls. It was all going to be a waste of money.

But then I understood what they wanted to do: Tell these donors that the money would be spent on the election, but in the end use it elsewhere. They wanted to save it to pay bills after the election, but who would give so much after a massive loss?

I reached Mr. Soros’s secretary in New York, and she was not dumb. She asked, “Why does Mr. Gephardt want to call over the weekend? Can’t this wait until next week?”

I did my best to bullshit her about the call. “Mr. Gephardt is just calling to wish him a happy weekend and talk about the election.” She didn’t go for it, and we didn’t raise our $1 million.

Newt Gingrich’s victory that November was monumental, and total. Republicans took the Senate too. Democrats everywhere, fresh off Bill Clinton’s big win in 1992, were beside themselves: distraught, confused, stunned, and reeling. No one knew what to do. How would the party react? Change the message? Blame Clinton? Attack Gingrich?

Democrats’ reaction to the loss would forever change the role of money in politics. Their conclusion was definitive but simple: We lost because we didn’t have enough money. Safe incumbents could have raised more. Challengers should have raised more. The party committees needed more. And Dick Gephardt wanted more: Win back the House in 1996, and he’d be the next Speaker. If you could fit all the Democratic fundraisers into a VW Bug in 1993, you’d need a cruise ship by mid-1995.

President Clinton would recover and win a landslide victory in 1996; much of that would come from his raw political skill and focus on centrist voters. But the secret piece of the puzzle was the massive amount of money that the Democratic National Committee raised in 1995 and 1996. The Clinton White House, hurting in the polls before the ’96 election, had gone into full panic mode. The DNC went into overdrive. The new M.O. for both was to do anything to suck up money, which they could because Clinton was still the president after all. Nancy Jacobson had started it on a small scale in 1993, but by January 1995, money was the central focus of Democrats.

House and Senate Democrats would try to copy them that election cycle. But House and Senate Democrats had what to offer, exactly? A Capitol tour? They’d been flying high after the 1992 election with complete control over the legislative process at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. By losing both houses of Congress, the power vanished. A real panic set in for Hill Democrats, who had little to offer donors compared to White House coffees and sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom. A full-time money war was on inside the Democratic Party, and the fundraisers became the frontline soldiers.

House Democrats huddled mere days after Dick Gephardt, now their highest-ranking member, had handed the Speaker’s gavel to Newt Gingrich. As minority leader, Gephardt could appoint loyalists to key positions, and his first was the strongest signal that money was now the only thing that mattered. Gephardt appointed Texan congressman Martin Frost as the new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the party committee in charge of electing Democrats to the House. In fifteen years of fundraising, I have never met a member of Congress who loved raising money as much as Martin Frost. He’d try to pass that love on to anybody who’d listen.

Frost’s impact was immediate. Days later, he made a presentation to the House Democratic Caucus: A minimum of twelve hours a week should be scheduled for each member to raise money. There was even a formula: Twelve hours would raise $15,000, and $15,000 over the next ninety-five weeks before the 1996 election would mean close to $1.5 million per member. Raising money in a member’s official office on Capitol Hill is illegal, so the DCCC set up a new phone room for members, about forty phones spread out in little cubicles. Walk on over across the street, have some free coffee, some soda, relax, and dial for dollars.

Next were “dues.” In the past, members had been asked to contribute $5,000 a year to the DCCC from their campaign accounts, a minimal fee used to pay the organization’s operating expenses. Nobody ever really paid, and no member ever was called out for not contributing.

Frost established mandatory payments for everyone, then raised the stakes. If you wanted to be the Number 1 Democrat on a committee, Frost and Gephardt required a $50,000 annual payoff. It was revolutionary. Imagine being a long-serving member of Congress who had worked hard to become the top dog on a committee—an incredibly powerful position and the crown jewel of many members’ careers. Most likely the member in question had risen to the committee chair because he had a safe seat and could concentrate on legislating and never really have to raise much money. Now members had to buy their power, with a minimum $100,000 contribution to the DCCC that election cycle: $50,000 in ’95, $50,000 in ’96.

At every caucus meeting, Frost would hand out a score sheet that listed members’ contributions. Frost wasn’t celebrating those who had paid. Rather, he had his own deadbeat list; he was embarrassing those at the bottom. Seniority would now be based on money, not legislative skill. For the first time in history, House Democrats had made money the central measuring stick of success. Republicans weren’t there yet, though they followed suit quickly.

Members who didn’t want to raise money at the new pace would not be considered “good” members of the caucus. The message was clear: If you had trouble in your next election, don’t expect any help from Dick Gephardt, Martin Frost, or the DCCC. No money for staff, for independent advertising, or for ground troops. It wasn’t a hollow threat, as the fight was on to get back to 218 House Democrats—the majority, and they would help any Democrat on the ballot who paid.

The threat did get members to raise money early. If incumbents could raise enough money in the first few months of 1995, two things would happen. A full campaign account might scare away opponents. Who wants to run against an opponent who has $500,000 in the bank from day one? If Democrats took the House back in 1996, it was made clear that members who had raised the money would be chosen to lead committees. Seniority was tossed out the window and replaced by a financial scorecard.

To the old guard, the new way of doing business was a massive shock. They held one or maybe two fundraisers every election cycle and raised a couple hundred thousand dollars. Without the constant chase for campaign dollars, the old guard focused on representing their districts and spent time getting to know their colleagues on the other side of the aisle and hammering out bipartisan legislation. Their time was fading fast.

The new demands of political money demanded a different type of candidate. By 1996, the average Democratic member was already raising more—$620,0004—just enough to be a member in good standing. The new standards applied to challengers too. If candidates couldn’t show the DCCC that they could raise real money—$500,000 to $1 million—the DCCC would not support them. The easiest way to hit that level was to be rich and write your campaign a big fat check. Yep, the DCCC under Martin Frost went out to recruit candidates who had money. It was a new type of Democrat.

The domino effect of these decisions would help change politics forever. Since the party decided it needed more money, that meant it needed to hire more staff to raise it. Fundraisers needed to justify their salaries, so they needed to raise more money. That meant scheduling more events, which meant members of Congress had to spend more time cultivating donors and less time doing their jobs.

These decisions created a new power base, an emerging center of political gravity: the fundraiser. As members needed to spend more and more time raising money, they’d spend more time with their fundraiser. Chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and policy staff started to mean less and less. Fundraisers began having a say in every aspect of the member’s day: policy decisions, political decisions, and scheduling decisions. Fundraisers became gatekeepers to Congress in just a matter of weeks.

All that seems fairly innocent on one level. Republicans had won and had been raising more money. But they also had a simple message that resonated with their rich donors: “Give money to us because we keep taxes and regulations low.” Democrats needed to compete, and without that message, had to find and then offer new rich donors influence and access. Easy enough, and they set out to do it.

But it was not innocent in the halls of Congress. Newt and his team responded to Democrats firing the first money shot by increasing pressure to raise on their members, of course.

Even worse, by the summer of 1995, House leadership on both sides of the aisle circulated new cheat sheets. Nobody talked much about them, and they were never widely distributed. I never saw the Republican version of the sheets, but I was told that Democratic House leaders just copied what the GOP did.

Not all senior staff knew about them. Gephardt’s chief of staff at the time, Tom O’Donnell, never mentioned them to me, and I doubt he knew about them. Gephardt’s deputy chief, Steve Elmendorf, casually laughed about them. He did it in a way that made sure we fundraisers knew what was on them.

The lists were campaign finance goals for new legislation. A tax proposal was worth $200,000 per member on the Ways and Means Committee; a proposal for a trade deal was worth $100,000. The lists went through every committee that could plausibly raise money in connection with legislation. Members played both sides, too—half the time lists were to scare opponents: “We will pass this bill unless you find us money not to.”

To this day, reporters and reformers talk about the evils of lobbyists and the Gucci gulch of K Street. They refuse to accept or say that the members of Congress forced this system on them. The lists are still used today, but they started in 1995 because the Democrats had a money panic.

11

After the 1994 election, our basement on C Street would no longer suffice. We moved the Gephardt operation to the “pink palace” on Pennsylvania Avenue. Keiloch came with us, Maroney did not. We hired more fundraisers, more assistants. The full-blown money machine was ramping up again. Patrick Kennedy had been elected to Congress from Rhode Island in 1994, and we rented space to his new fundraiser, Jamie Whitehead.

And I was “promoted” to raising money for Jonesy. He gave me my first task, Gephardt’s big annual DC event. This would be the first real test, not only for me but also for House Democrats. In the minority for the first time since the 1950s, whether donors would give was an open question. With all the power in Newt’s hands, would they care? Confusion and fear ran deep.

But I had my chance. I was a fighter, I had bought into the message: We needed to raise money to win back the House. I did what David Jones had taught me: I sent out those host letters, then I called potential hosts. And I called them again, often spending close to twelve hours a day on the phone. I was scared for my party and my job. I wanted to win.

I didn’t have David Bender’s Clinton/Gore plates, but I had some of my own juice: first, a host committee breakfast meeting. Yep, not only would hosts get the chance to be listed on the invite for the big event, but I invited them to a special, exclusive breakfast meeting with Gephardt. We had begun servicing our big donors.

Next, I got call time with Gephardt, a new tool. I was able to put him on the phone with donors, and often. Dick would call twelve hours a week, just like everyone else. Gephardt was no Martin Frost, who’d pick up the phone and ask anybody for money. He was his good ol’ Midwestern self; he couldn’t make the ask for a dollar amount. But he would do his job mechanically.

To ingratiate myself to donors, I would dial them and chitchat for a minute about life. I did this not because I really cared about them but to imprint in their minds that I, the fundraiser, was their point of access to power. After my short chat I would announce that I had somebody with me who wanted to say “Hi,” though I’d never say who it was. Gephardt would sit and read the paper and wait for me to get somebody on the phone. His standard greeting was “How are you doing?” to every person he talked to. He would listen, not care what anyone said on the other end, then go into his big pitch about House Democrats winning in 1996. He closed with “By gosh, I need you to help me and hope that you can join me for my next event. Lindsay can give you all the details.” Good-bye, that was it. On to the next call.

Gephardt spoke slowly. And, by speaking slowly, he dominated the conversation, avoided tough questions, and took up the few minutes he had to speak with a prospect. Ninety percent of the time he had no idea to whom he had just spoken. That was his game, creating distant relationships.

Now, the other members of Congress never had the luxury of being the party leader. They had to call and actually have real conversations with donors. Long, time-consuming conversations, schmoozing donors because they didn’t have Gephardt’s power. Some corporate or union donors would respond right away with an immediate yes, but others made members beg. Making a member beg meant the donor would say, “Call me back next week and I will see if I have it in my budget.” It was a strategic ploy by the lobbyist or political action committee director; you never know what bill a client wants to talk about next week, so a lobbyist has done his job by getting a member to call back.

Gephardt’s big event was just over the horizon. I was relentless: faxing, mailing, and calling nonstop. I had secured over a hundred hosts, three weeks beforehand, which meant at least $150,000 in firm commitments. I took those hundred names, put them on the invitation, and mailed out ten thousand invites. I did double check to make sure I had spelled everybody’s name right. I might have been the worst fundraiser ever, but I learned from my mistakes!

I called as many of those ten thousand people as I could over the next three weeks. I could fit in 150 calls a day, as most calls wound up in voicemail boxes. When somebody confirmed their attendance, I immediately sent a note thanking them and telling them where to send the check. With each thank-you note, I enclosed two extra invites and asked that they pass them to a friend. The biggest possible checkwriters would receive a special thank you call from Leader Gephardt.

We rented out B. Smith’s restaurant at Union Station—a mammoth hall the length of the building—for the first fundraising event in over forty years when Democrats were in the minority in the House of Representatives. This was my chance, my moment, my Alamo. Failure was not an option, and I was worried.

I added some touches of flair. American flags everywhere. What says pride in America like a bunch of checkwriters sipping fancy wine with the Democratic leader of the House? I paid $500 to a balloon guy to decorate the entrance. Slight hiccup with that—he showed up with four balloons. What the fuck, $125 a balloon? But my new strategy was a sign of the changing times: I wanted to show donors a good time, and that meant spending more of the money they’d donated. Make it big, make it grandiose, spend their money to make them feel important . . . and they will come back.

Before 1996, members would usually spend about 10 percent of their campaign accounts to raise money. With this new emphasis on money, the cost would go over 20 percent in 1996. We ended up with plenty of $125 balloons and the like, but it was all about the volume of cash: Spend it to get it.

We invited all the remaining House Democrats to join the party as our guests. That may sound like a nice thing to do, but it was about filling the room. Nobody ever knows how much you raise in a night, but if they see an event packed with people, donors assume you raised a lot. Almost every Democratic member of Congress showed up.

And the donors did too, in droves. Lines out the door. Every Democratic lobbyist you could think of showed up and left a check. Gephardt’s big event the prior year raised about $200,000, at a time when he was in the majority and had real power. That night, in the minority, we collected over $500,000 in a massive showing of cash, pride, and momentum. I saw it in the eyes of the members of Congress who walked around that event: We can do this. We can raise money. We can win the House back. Money is the answer.

I was now a fundraiser.

12

In the days and weeks after my smashing success, a funny thing happened. House Democrats—the powerful men and women in elected office? those who I admired?—started calling me, twenty-four-year-old me, just to say hello. I’d see them in the halls of Congress and they’d wave at me and smile. When I showed up at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee offices, members put their phones down and sweet-talked me. I had raised so much money for Gephardt; surely I could help them.

I became King of the New DC Bullshit. I’d never been elected, never done any policy, never written legislation, never done much of anything of consequence. But I could raise new DC money, and they all wanted a piece. Two years earlier, no member of Congress knew the top fundraisers by name; they could barely remember the name of their own. They never saw them, talked to them, or dealt with them outside of one or two events a year. But by 1995, fundraisers picked up the golden touch, and members of Congress wanted to run with it.

Donors realized it too, and realized that I had time with and access to Gephardt no one else did. I started getting gifts. Real gifts: tickets to any sporting event I wanted. Bored on a Friday? I’d call up George Tagg, the FedEx lobbyist, and he would have a private plane waiting at National Airport to fly us anywhere. If you wanted to be on my good side, don’t take me to some sandwich shop for lunch; the Capital Grille would be fine. As campaign staff, not a single regulation or ethics rule restrained me.

As glorious as this might sound, deep down I was extremely uncomfortable. I hated it. The whole idea that the monied class had something that everybody else didn’t—access to power—bothered me. I wanted to take care of the donors and friends who represented the middle class (unions, mostly) and to cut off the insanely rich interests who wanted something in return for their money.

I could squeeze only about $300,000 a year from labor. That sounds like a lot, but when you are raising $10 million a year, in hard and soft money, it wasn’t that much. Even though they didn’t have the kind of money that some of the big donors had, I found myself making sure that the labor folks had access to and time with Gephardt. I went out of my way to do private events with just labor leaders. I didn’t care, these were my kind of folks.

Pretty soon, I began to hate Capital Grille lunches with big bank and insurance industry lobbyists. Spending an hour or two with Paul Equale, the chief lobbyist for the Independent Insurance Agents, was becoming a painful thought. I wanted to escape. Don Kaniewski and Tim Scully saved me. Don represented the Laborers’ International Union and Scully worked at Philip Morris, although Tim had been with the Teamsters for a long time before. They had little get-togethers on Fridays at Old Glory, the Georgetown barbecue joint. It was far enough removed from Capitol Hill that we would never run into other lobbyists. Brilliant.

My first lunch adventure with Tim and Don didn’t work out too well. You know what goes well with ribs and BBQ chicken? Draft beers, about eight of them. To complicate matters, I had call time with Gephardt at 3 pm. I left Old Glory just a little on the tipsy side. Walking into the office at 2:30 pm, I downed some coffee and told my new assistant, Liesl, that I was going to take a short nap, for just fifteen minutes.

“When Gephardt shows up for call time, please wake me up,” I murmured to her as I slithered under my desk, George Costanza style.

At 9 pm, with a big headache and no idea where I was, I found a note mysteriously taped to my chest: “Hi Lindsay, I tried to wake you but you wouldn’t budge. Mr. Gephardt came and left when he could not find you. Hope you have a good weekend, Liesl.”

People get fired for much, much less. But fundraisers were becoming so powerful that we were untouchable. We would throw parties at Chief Ike’s in Adams Morgan and could make everyone come, just because we were so powerful. I’d show up not completely sober some mornings. Once I forced my way into a meeting with the Dalai Lama, just because I thought I deserved to be there. And I continued having lunch with Don and Tim on Fridays, but stopped scheduling call time on Friday afternoon.

13

We made a big decision: Gephardt would spend on average one weekend a month in St. Louis, the congressional district he represented. He’d spend one weekend at home in Herndon, Virginia, with his family. And he’d spend two weekends a month raising money, for his campaign, for the Effective Government Committee, for the DCCC, for other members. Anywhere Jonesy and I could come up with. Politicians were now spending significantly more of their time raising money.

DC money had showed up for the big event—it was easy; companies, lobbyists, and unions had political giving budgets. But would lots and lots of rich Democratic donors outside DC and outside his network of presidential campaign supporters care about Dick Gephardt, now minority leader? It was a big risk—a new kind of donor in new cities—but time to prove I could do it all.

Gephardt’s schedule permitted roughly twenty-five fundraising trips a year around the country in the 1995–1996 cycle. Compare that to the five or six traveling events before the 1994 election, and it worked out to about a 500 percent increase in fundraising time on the road. Add that to the now-regular twelve hours of call time Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays while the House was in session, and Dick Gephardt (and others in Congress) spent a majority of their time with us, the fundraisers. Not with his chief of staff, his legislative staff, or any other of his seventy staffers on the Hill. Not even Gephardt’s wife, Jane, spent that much time with him. Raising money was becoming his central preoccupation, taking most of his time, dictating his schedule, and occupying his thoughts . . . time that should have been spent on legislation or building relationships with Republicans.

Just look at a map and you can see potential one-day trips outside of DC. If you hustled, it was possible to hit Baltimore, Philly, and New York in just eighteen hours. Jonesy’s first road-trip assignment took me up I-95 to Baltimore. Gephardt was set to grab a 7 am train out of DC, pull into Baltimore for breakfast, ride up to Philadelphia for a lunch, and hit New York for a big-money dinner. He could jump on a 10:30 pm shuttle out of LaGuardia and be in bed in DC by midnight. The kitty for this East Coast whirlwind? At least $100,000. My sole responsibility was the Baltimore breakfast meeting, where I needed to raise $30,000.

I did some quick math. If I could get a hundred people to donate $500 for a breakfast reception with Leader Gephardt, I’d haul in $50,000 and be a star. I booked the Baltimore Center Club for a hundred for breakfast and got to work. After I had just raised over $500,000 in DC, $30,000 would be simple, a piece of cake.

A few names stood out, like Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos and a few trial attorneys. I had learned from Jonesy to go after as many folks as you can, and I did. One donor intrigued me, a guy named Willie Runyon, who owned an ambulance company in Baltimore. He had given $25,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) the year before.

I started calling invitees. And calling. And calling. And calling. It’s what fundraisers do.

One hundred unanswered, unreturned phone calls quickly became two hundred. I didn’t exactly panic, but I was starting to become frustrated. Do people in Baltimore not care about politics? Next, I mailed out an invite, designed on a fancy card that looked like it came from an important office at the U.S. Capitol. Surely that would impress rich people. The card was embossed with a gold dome on the front and a return address marked “Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt.” I sent three thousand.

And I kept calling. And calling. And calling. Raising money outside DC was proving a big challenge.

I made Gephardt call too, trying to shake the trees a little more with his help. He didn’t have much luck either. But I stayed positive. If I left enough messages, they’d start talking about this amazing Gephardt fundraiser over rounds of golf, cigars, and poker games. But Willie was still on my mind. He represented at least another $25,000. So I applied myself. When he didn’t call back on day one, I called him on day two, then on day three. Every day, 9:30 am. For forty-three straight days.

On day 44 he took my call.

“What the hell?” He was gruff but likable. “What the fuck could you possibly want? Can’t you understand I don’t want to talk to you?”

Just happy that a big donor was talking to me, I gave my best pitch. “Well, Mr. Runyon, I work for Leader Richard Gephardt, and we’re having a breakfast meeting at the Center Club so he can get to know some of the local businesspeople.”

“Fuck off. I have no interest in spending my morning at the Baltimore Center Club with a bunch of tight-ass lawyers.” Willie was a good ol’ boy from West Virginia. I loved this guy. He shared my pain. “Now, if Dick Gephardt wants to come visit me in my office, I’d be happy to chat.”

Make Dick come to me, that’s how money outside Washington works. So I set it up for right after our breakfast: We would drive over to see Willie.

With thousands of invitations out the door and a barrage of follow-up phone calls, I was positive at least seventy-five guests would show. The night before the event, I had only four confirmed RSVPs, but I knew I’d worked hard. Maybe the new breed of non-DC bigwigs didn’t bother to respond. Nervous but confident, I hopped on a 6 am train and arrived at the Baltimore Center Club an hour early. I made sure the tables were preset with fruit plates—I wanted to seat and feed the guests quickly before Gephardt spoke—and reserved the head table for my top targets. The glass bowl that would receive all the checks sat on the edge of the check-in table.

At 7:55 am, the lobby phone rang. It was Gephardt’s deputy chief of staff, Steve Elmendorf, calling to say they were downstairs. Steve was a typical Hill staffer of the early ’90s, with some skill and political ability. But at that time, he lacked an understanding of and an appreciation for the new role money was beginning to play. At first, he disdained the money and the lobbyist world and wanted to protect Gephardt from it. The Steve Elmendorfs of Capitol Hill tried to hold on to power against the wave of money, but in the end they just seemed lost in the new political process. Since he couldn’t beat them, he’d eventually join them.

Steve had joined Gephardt in 1992 after being Congressman Dennis Eckart’s (D-OH) chief of staff. The Democratic Party still hadn’t fully embraced supporting gay rights, and in one of the first off-the-cuff conversations I had with Terry McAuliffe he told me that, “had we known Steve was gay, we would have never hired him.” Terry, as with most Democrats, has updated his views and now supports gay rights, but at the time, Steve didn’t fit in with Terry’s boys’ network.

Terry McAuliffe and Steve Elmendorf both have evolved since 1992. Terry evolved on the gay issue, and Steve soon started to play ball with big money. He realized that raising a lot of money from a few folks had merit to it, no matter what the trade-offs. Today Steve is one of the highest-paid lobbyists in DC and has given over $383,000 of his own money to candidates just in the last ten years.5

When Steve called up that morning, I seized. One of the ten most powerful people in the country was about to walk into a room—a room I was responsible for filling—and almost no one had arrived. Gephardt made a grand entrance into a breakfast with four people, two of whom I’d let in for free as a favor. I raised $200 from two donors. To Gephardt’s credit, he put on his best face and joked whether his four supporters would be able to find somewhere quiet to have a serious conversation. Gephardt finished his chat in thirty minutes and looked like he was about to grab the other ninety-six plates of fruit and take them with us.

By that time, Steve was just beginning to realize the potential of big money and wanted Jonesy and me to start only focusing on large donors around the country. He smelled that Willie was a potential whale, and wanted to impress the point on Dick. Steve would give lip service to the labor guys, but he never understood or appreciated how important they were to Gephardt’s political coalition. The mismatch of Dick Gephardt, the champion of labor and the middle class, with a senior staffer who didn’t appreciate some of his key supporters would later end Gephardt’s political career, and Dick never saw it coming.

Right after that failed Baltimore breakfast, we headed to Runyon’s office. The place stunk and seemed like a major fire hazard: Medicare forms, insurance packets, brochures, ambulance service forms lay everywhere. Willie didn’t like computers. The nice lady out front walked us back to Willie’s private office—a dingy smelly closet no bigger than a hundred square feet. So small that Elmendorf had to stand for the meeting, while Dick and I sat on a little green couch that had to be forty years old.

Willie was happy. He liked having the Democratic leader in his office. He glowed regaling Dick with stories about West Virginia politics and a few heart-tugging tales about his problems with a Medicare reimbursement audit that he seemed to want Dick to look into. Gephardt loved Willie as much as I did, though I don’t know if it was enough to help him with those Medicare problems. If Dick represented a middle-class, middle America success story in politics, Willie represented one in business. Steve spent the entire thirty minutes about as uncomfortable as he could be. Steve had nothing in common with Willie.

“Well, all right,” Willie concluded with a twinge of West Virginia on his lips. “Leader Gephardt, how do you want me to write this here check?”

I saved Leader Gephardt the trouble of making the ask.

“Willie, you have a couple options. You could write $2,000 to Leader Gephardt’s campaign account, ‘Gephardt in Congress.’ That’s $1,000 for the primary and $1,000 for the general election. Then you could write a $5,000 for the Effective Government Committee, Leader Gephardt’s political action committee, that will allow him to donate to other Democrats running for office around the country. Or you could do $15,000 for the DCCC, to help Democratic House candidates in general. We’re trying to win the House back this year.”

The sonuvabitch wrote all three checks on the spot, totaling $22,000, and handed them over to Gephardt. I loved Willie. He surely had saved my ass, and maybe my job. Fundraisers have to produce, and my breakfast hadn’t. Gephardt and Steve jumped on the next train to Philadelphia. I went back to the Center Club for some fruit.

14

By the spring of 1995, the pressure to justify our salaries had become intense. The previous year had been a little more innocent: They didn’t pay Jonesy or me much, and, consequently, we didn’t do that much with only five or six trips a year. Now with twenty-five trips to schedule, our salaries had gone up, but we had to find enough donors to make it worthwhile.

As I had learned with my Baltimore experience, we just could not parachute into a new city, send a bunch of invites, and expect to raise money. Maybe the president could do that, but the “lowly” Democratic leader of the House sure couldn’t.

We innovated. We decided we needed wealthy people who had access to money, people who could find friends and colleagues around the country who could pull together fifteen or twenty people who’d write checks for $1,000 or more. We had to find, cultivate, service, and kiss the asses of the few Democrats in each city who could help us. In return, these individuals would be granted ultimate access. In 1995, they became a crucial constituency of the Democratic Party that still exists today.

We created “donor-raisers.” In years prior, having one person pull together $10,000 from friends was a big deal. Only a few of those gems existed for House Democrats, and more important, since we didn’t need that much money in those days, our donor-raisers only got “begged” to pull money together every few years. Today, every member of Congress—not just leadership—makes that ask, constantly.

This new reliance on the big donor-raiser (“big” being relative; the $10,000 donor-raiser no longer matters, today it’s the $100,000 donor-raiser) created a new problem for the very wealthy: the checks for $25,000 or $50,000 that they wrote themselves started meaning less. Individual checkwriters who didn’t also raise money from others started losing control of the party. They are fighting this battle to this day. Today’s billionaires began by using a mechanism called the “Democracy Alliance” to gain back power. More on that later.

As Willie Sutton, the infamous bank robber, said, go where the money is. There aren’t many places around this country with donors who can raise that kind of big money. As we scoped out upcoming trips, a trend became clear: New York had enough rich people to handle seven or eight trips a year; Los Angeles, five or six. Florida, Boston, Chicago, Texas, Philadelphia, maybe one or two. Middle America didn’t make the cut anymore: Cleveland, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Kansas City were out. Our new donors wouldn’t drink beer from a can or understand traditional middle-class struggles—buying health insurance, building a nice place in the ’burbs, finding money for the kids to go to college—that the Democratic Party had paid attention to. Our new donors drank champagne from flutes.

In previous years, Gephardt had done a trip to the North Carolina Outer Banks with some labor leaders and other Democratic lobbyists. It was a way to spend some time with donors outside of the typical DC event. Two or three days at the beach with Dick and Jane Gephardt was a great way for them to bond with donors, grant access, and build loyalty.

But this was 1995: We needed donor-raisers, not DC checkwriters. We banned lobbyists from attending—our goal was to find twenty major donors around the country who would eventually host Gephardt and raise him money in their cities, $20,000 kind of money, or more.

We chose the days after the 4th of July. Jonesy and I had gone down to Duck, North Carolina, and rented ten massive, expensive homes on prime beachfront real estate for the week. We decided we would put two couples in each home, our way of bonding donors together and with Gephardt. The week cost over $100,000 for rent, booze, food, and transportation. Sure, it was a lot of money, but it was about investing in the future. We charged each couple $2,500 to recoup some costs, but we were still $50,000 in the hole.

I loved my labor union political directors, so I made a simple suggestion to Gephardt’s deputy chief of staff, Steve Elmendorf. “Steve, let’s not hide who we are, why not spend a few days at the beach with both labor and the rich folks we’re trying to cultivate?”

Steve laughed it off. “No way, no how, not going to happen.”

“You know this is the coalition that Dick needs if he wants to run again for president,” I shot back.

“No labor,” he insisted. “We’ve got them already, and we can’t squeeze any more out of them. This weekend is about building relationships with rich donors who can lead us to even more money. Period.”

Steve was the boss, so Jonesy and I set out to find rich Democrats who wanted to go to the beach with Dick and Jane and could raise at least $20,000 a year. To add some spice to the invite, and because we knew members had been inspired to raise more money, we invited a few to join us. This first trip would include Bob Torricelli from New Jersey, who’d later go on to be a senator, Bill Jefferson of Louisiana, and Tim Holden of Pennsylvania.

We sent out about three hundred invite letters: big shots on Wall Street, Hollywood studio heads, investment bankers in Chicago and Boston, insurance salesmen, and corporate attorneys. It took some effort, but fifteen couples joined us. Clive and Ann Cummis from New Jersey, the owner of the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas, a Puerto Rican insurance mogul from Harlem, a real estate investor from Atlanta, and the members of Congress.

Jonesy and I went down a few days early to set everything up. We needed to be careful about which couples were housed together so they got along. Jonesy and I took the biggest house to host evening cocktails and dinner, and we stacked each house with gifts: liquor, food, magazines, chocolates . . . five-star treatment for our new donor-raisers.

One of my jobs for the week was to make sure the members of Congress got to the beach. Tim Holden drove down from Pennsylvania, so no problem. Bob Torricelli flew in on a private jet with his then girlfriend, Bianca Jagger. Bill Jefferson flew into Richmond with his wife. Fucking Richmond, two hours away. So on day one of this glorious week at the beach, I drove two hours to Richmond and two hours back.

I arrived early at the Richmond airport. With no idea what he looked like, I walked around for an hour trying to find Bill Jefferson. When I finally did, an hour later, he was mad as hell, which led to one long-ass, silent two-hour drive to the beach. In 2009, Bill Jefferson was found guilty on eleven counts of bribery for using his position on the House Ways and Means Committee to funnel business to companies that had paid him off. The FBI found $90,000 cash in his freezer, and he began a thirteen-year sentence in 2012.6 If that money would have gone to his campaign instead, he never would have had a problem. He came to the beach that year not because of loyalty to Gephardt but because of the money people he might meet.

The donors starting arriving. Most drove; a few took private planes. Carlos, the insurance mogul from Harlem whose last name escapes me, arrived in style: His entire family—his wife and five kids—pulled up in a Rolls-Royce he had driven from Harlem, gold rims and all. The daily ritual was pool time, beach time, and a get-together for dinner. The politicians all tried to find private time with each donor to make the pitch. So did Jonesy and I, while Dick and Jane just enjoyed the time at the beach.

Drinks and dinner started at 7 pm at the main house. Kelly’s Outer Banks down in Nags Head catered, and our one menu instruction was to bring only Budweiser products and one case of Miller Lite. Gephardt represented St. Louis, Budweiser’s hometown, but Jane Gephardt hated it. She was a Miller Lite lady. But since she obviously couldn’t be seen drinking a Miller product, we handed her bottles of Bud Light filled with Miller Lite, with a wink and a nod.

One of our daily activities at Duck was playing pickup basketball each afternoon before dinner. Not everybody played, but usually Richard Sullivan, the DNC’s finance director, and Dick Gephardt would join me with one other for a little two on two. I was slightly hung over on one day and was just happy to stand under the basket and let Gephardt pass me the ball. I was taller than everyone else, so I could reach over them and drop it in the basket pretty easily. The strategy worked. We won big. And to this day, the nickname that Gephardt gave me stuck: the Chief. He compared me to the Indian chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The trip was an unquestioned success. By the end of the week, we had arranged a bunch of new events, Harlem, Las Vegas, and others. We had discovered a new way to connect with the biggest of the best of the new breed of Democratic funders. We would repeat this several times: Telluride, Colorado, a return to Duck, Nantucket, and elsewhere. Over the years, other members of Congress would pick up the idea, and today every weekend is filled with exotic trips with donors. It all started and ramped up with a Rolls-Royce in Duck, NC.

15

We had two fundraising trips a month, and when we could handle the travel arrangements through commercial planes, we did. But when we couldn’t for whatever reason, we had to find a private plane. A fleet of the Democratic Party “friends’” private and corporate jets sits at National Airport to this day. Senators got prime choice, House leadership like Gephardt got second choice, and other members of Congress never got calls returned.

The rule was straightforward: We could use any plane as long as we paid the owner first-class airfare for Gephardt. If the United first-class fare from DC to Dallas was $900, that’s what we paid. And not a penny more. With few regulations on campaign staff, fundraisers flew free. It saved time and hassle to have the jets ready to fly. Friday afternoons in the tiny private jet lobby at National was the most powerful room in Washington, full of a quorum of senators, Dick Gephardt, Newt Gingrich, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) waiting around for booze and food to be loaded onto the private planes before taking off for a weekend of fundraising, work, or pleasure.

We split up the list of the planes from best to worst. It had nothing to do with the quality of the planes but everything to do with how much effort was involved in securing their use.

The gold standard was Archer Daniels Midland, the food processing giant just up the road from Dick’s hometown of St. Louis. The company had four or five jets at all times at National Airport. We would call the CEO’s office, tell them our needs, and they would respond right away. Nobody from ADM would be on the plane, just the pilots and us. Our other top choices were Philip Morris, FedEx, and Aflac.

The planes of two Democratic donors, Jack Rosen from New Jersey and J.J. Cafaro from Ohio, ended up at the bottom of the list. J.J. was a pain in the ass, but when we got desperate we would call for his plane. What this meant was that J.J. would be flying with us, and we would have to talk to him throughout the flight. J.J. was a consistent presence in my career.

Even As the Democratic leader, Gephardt kept raising money not only for himself and his PAC but also for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. One of the hidden chunks of Democratic cash lay on the beach down on this little island called Puerto Rico. I didn’t understand why it was such a hotbed, but Jonesy told me to travel down with Dick and Jane for a weekend of DCCC events. We would have two major fundraisers, one at the Hilton in Puerto Rico and one over on St. Thomas at the home of Hess Oil owner, Leon Hess. Combined, we would raise over $200,000 for the DCCC that weekend. Equally important to Dick and Jane was some quality vacation time paid for by the DCCC.

The three of us boarded a private jet at Dulles Airport and took off. Over a hundred police officers met us on the tarmac in San Juan, lined up like for a presidential visit. Three bodyguards watched over me twenty-four hours a day. Dick and Jane had eight. The cops closed off all the streets along the route of our caravan—complete with helicopter overhead—so we could get to the Hilton in under ten minutes.

We got settled in at the Hilton and had a few hours before that evening’s dinner fundraiser. Dick and Jane donned their bathing suits and headed out to the beach, I watched from my balcony, smiling from ear to ear, as eight bodyguards dutifully followed. When the Gephardts went swimming, so did two of their minders, still dressed in suit jackets. I wasn’t sure what the threat was; maybe Scarface had surfaced in San Juan. The evening event was a spectacle. Blaring music, a rope line for Dick, and a packed room full of white suits. I guess this was high society for the Puerto Rican elite. I loved every minute of it.

We got up the next morning and went off for the brunch fundraiser at the Hess home. Different crowd, mostly white Northern folks who had settled down on the islands. It was much more akin to a DC event. Fine with me. We did our job and raised the money.

We still had a day and a half of downtime to hang out at the beach. Jane called the next morning. “Dick and I would love to hop over to the U.S. Virgin Islands today. Could you call and arrange the plane?”

“No problem, Mrs. Gephardt.” I was going too.

This change in plans caused quite a stir with our bodyguards. They couldn’t handle the request, so we agreed that they’d take us to the airport and meet us when we got back. Besides my swimming trunks, all I had to wear was my business suit. Off we went. When we landed, Dick and Jane set off on their own. I went to a bar near the beach and settled in for the day, happy to just relax. Sunday at 10 am is not the best time to be at a bar, but I made do. A few younger local guys plopped down next to me.

“Hey, man, why are you in that suit? You going to church or something?” asked the first.

“Oh, just working, not a big deal,” I replied.

“So even though you’re a big white dude in a suit,” began the second, “you like to party?”

I just looked at him, confused. He looked back, nodded, touched his index finger to his thumb, brought them to his lips and inhaled. Not subtle. Ah, I got the message. I’ve never smoked much weed, and I sure as hell didn’t feel quite right getting high on an official trip with the Democratic leader of the House just minutes away. But then again, I had at least eight hours to kill. If I smoked a little now, I would be sober by the time we left. So party we did.

We walked down a private quiet little side street and they handed me a joint. Between the beers, the heavy heat, and the joint . . . dammit all, it was about the greatest feeling in the world. After splitting the joint, my newfound party buddies had an offer for me: I could buy as much of this great stuff as I wanted.

I might not have been a regular user of pot, but I was sky high and had plenty of friends in DC who might want to share this amazing experience. One of my many quirks is that I always carry a lot of cash on me. Traveling with Gephardt, I had a fear that a global emergency might strand us somewhere and I’d need the money to pay our way back to DC.

So I took that emergency cash and added it to what I could get out of the ATM, cobbling together about $2,500. In the U.S. Virgin Islands marijuana market, that is a lot of money. They gave me two large bricks and a few extra joints for being such a good customer. Since we had a private plane back to San Juan and then DC, no worries about airport security. But damn, it stunk. I took the twenty bucks I had left and bought three cans of Right Guard spray deodorant. I doused each brick.

Eight hours in the sun smoking pot and drinking beers in my suit made for one long-ass day. My happy self jumped on the plane with a highly illegal smile. Dick and Jane told me they had a wonderful day shopping. I did my best to keep my mouth shut, as I had no clue what might come out. What an amazing flight. Everything seemed surreal and wonderful. I swear, glorious dolphins jumped as high as our plane, guiding us home to San Juan. We landed at San Juan and the plane taxied to the private hanger.

Holy shit. I didn’t think I had to be worried about security, but damn. Over a hundred cops, lights flashing on their cruisers, pointed big guns at the plane waiting for us. Motherfuckers, they got me. How did they know I spent the whole day buying pot? I was going to spend the next twenty years in a Puerto Rican jail. I sweated through my suit, panicking. I tried to keep quiet.

I did the only thing I could think of: I took my two bricks of pot and stuffed them into Jane’s large purse when she wasn’t looking. If anybody was going to jail that day, it was Jane Gephardt . . . drug queen Jane Gephardt. Nice lady, drug dealer!

We exited the plane. Dick and Jane went left, I dove right. And then it hit me—the police escort! Shit. These cops had come to take us back to the Hilton, not take me to prison. That moment of clarity was the greatest high ever. I got into the car with Dick and Jane.

“Jane,” I said, as calmly as I could muster, “I love that purse. Did you get it down here?”

“Oh, no. This old thing? I got it at Filene’s at home.”

“It’s still very nice. Would you mind if I took a quick look at it? I might want to get something like it for my girlfriend.”

I got my pot back and Jane got a purse that smelled like Right Guard.

16

I was traveling nonstop by 1995, doing events for Gephardt, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and other candidates for Congress. Raising money was the vehicle back to the House majority, and we were focused like a laser. Members of Congress who had never been involved with party activities now got the message: Raise not just for your own campaign but help the DCCC too, or you will not be part of the next Democratic majority. After all, they could raise directly for the DCCC or transfer unlimited amounts of extra money from their own campaign account.

Everybody got involved, from the most liberal to the longest-serving members. Not only did they have to write checks, they had to raise money. One year prior, these same people didn’t make calls, knew only the donors who came to see them in their offices, and spent a majority of their time with other members of Congress and senior staff, legislating.

If ranking House committee members—who hoped to be powerful committee chairs in the next majority—“owed” the DCCC $50,000 a year now, they had to get creative to reach new donors around the country. Party committees—the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—faced no restrictions on the amount they could take in. Companies and union political action committees were restricted to giving only $15,000 in hard money to the party committees. Wealthy individuals could give as much soft money as they wanted to the party. Guess who got targeted?

Of course, members were still happy to take money from PACs, even with their limits. PAC directors scrambled to take credit for donations as often as they could. When a member of Congress called a lobbyist and asked for a DCCC contribution, the lobbyist would commit $15,000. When the next member called, the lobbyist would commit the same $15,000. Twenty members would end up claiming credit for the same $15,000, and the lobbyists who controlled the money didn’t care. DCCC chair Martin Frost cut that game off quickly. If a member wanted credit for a check, the donor had to hand-deliver it.

It was tough to get rich people to care about Congress. The House of Representatives wasn’t that sexy, but President Clinton was. The DNC started inviting rich donors to White House coffees for $50,000 a seat in soft money, which allowed donors to come sit around a table of ten people with the president for a few minutes. Wealthy donors thought it a better investment to give to him, and they were rewarded with White House coffees, stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, calls from Vice President Al Gore. Terry McAuliffe was behind much of it, and the Clinton team got a ton of bad press, like this:7

The documents show that Clinton scribbled his enthusiastic approval for the overnight stays on the McAuliffe memorandum, which recommended that major financial supporters be invited to meals, coffees, rounds of golf or jogging excursions.

“Yes, pursue all 3 and promptly—and get other names of the 100,000 or more,” Clinton wrote, apparently seeking names of people who had given $100,000 or more to the Democrats.

It was an impressive way to capture the richest of the rich and give them access that nobody else had, access with which they could bend Clinton’s ear on policy, tell him how to run his campaign, or instruct the White House how they wanted their money spent.

The DNC would aggressively sell these private gatherings, and by the summer of 1995—eighteen months before the next election—the DNC went up with TV ads for Clinton’s reelection. It was revolutionary and marked the beginning of the permanent campaign. Before 1995, large amounts of TV time were usually reserved for the closing months of elections, not eighteen months prior.

The arms race for political money was on. Democrats had fired the first shot.

17

In 1992, fundraisers generally tried to keep the cost of raising money under 10 percent of what they brought in. By the time a member hired one of the few consultants to handle the single big DC event, then paid for the food, venue, and invitations, it might run about $15,000 a year while realistically bringing in $150,000. With the average campaign costing about $470,000, that $150,000 was a good chunk.

By 1995, costs were escalating. The full-time fundraiser or consultant cost anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 a month in pay and benefits. To cover the additional event venues, food, and travel around the country, the gross costs could be well over $100,000. That meant you had to raise that much more to justify the expenses.

One week a summer in Duck, North Carolina, wasn’t enough. David Jones wanted to expand the program, to get more donor-raisers involved with Gephardt. Almost everybody who had visited Duck had gone on to host a fundraiser for Gephardt, which meant the attention we lavished on them was working.

It was time for a winter trip in 1995. Gephardt had done a few other weekends on a smaller scale, but David was not much for the mild; he wanted to go over the top. We rented rooms at the Peaks Resort in Telluride for our winter retreat with Dick and Jane and began contacting as many potential big donor-raisers as we could find. We convinced a bunch to spend a long weekend in Telluride.

Dan Amos, the CEO of Aflac insurance, arrived on his private Gulfstream jet. Terry and his wife, Dorothy McAuliffe, came along. In all we had about twenty people plus David and me, Patrick Kennedy and his chief of staff, Tony Marcella. We had a few others from the usual crowd of donor-raisers from around the country, the most prominent of whom were John and Jane Huang.

John Huang was the Chinese American former head of Lippo Bank USA. He resigned and went to work at the Commerce Department early in the Clinton administration, then moved over to the Democratic National Committee to raise money in 1995. Jonesy knew of him and wanted to cultivate him so he’d raise money not just for the DNC but for Dick Gephardt and House Democrats too. I had met him on my first day when working for Nancy at the DNC. It’s easy to say in hindsight, but he immediately seemed shady. In the run-up to the 1996 election, it turns out Huang funneled $156,000 in illegal foreign donations to the Clinton campaign and DNC. In 1999, he pled guilty, was fined $10,000, and faced a year of probation.

But first, he went skiing with us.

We always took a group photo at the end of these trips, so the donors would have something to brag about to their high-powered friends . . . who, we hoped, would also want to get in on the act. Since we were in Telluride, we decided to ski up to the top ridge overlooking the city and take the photo there.

The next morning at 11, we arrived at the ridge, everyone in ski gear. Then we heard a couple snowmobiles shooting up the mountain behind us. Were we somehow breaking the law up there? Nope. John and Jane Huang had hired snowmobiles to ferry them up the slope. We were at one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the country, but two of our top targets were too good for the lift. And they were wearing business suits. So we snapped a photo of eighteen skiers and two Asian Americans in business suits.

This trip was expensive. The hotel rooms, meals, flights, and ski passes added up. In 1995, campaigns generally didn’t have official credit cards. For some of the bigger items, the campaign would get billed what you spent, and you’d send a check. But sometimes staffers like me had to put things on a personal credit card and get reimbursed by the Effective Government Committee. Normally this was simple enough; it would be a few dollars for day trips with Gephardt.

But our jaunt to Telluride landed over $80,000 on my American Express Gold Card. Most congressional campaigns were still in the realm of $500,000; we had spent more than 15 percent of that in one weekend.

When we got back to DC, Steve Elmendorf was pissed off at Jonesy for the out-of-control spending. On one level, Steve was right. I didn’t understand why we spent so much to raise money; it always bothered me. I was concerned with our net profit. Couldn’t we have just dropped $40,000 on our prospective donors and still made them happy? Steve refused to authorize the reimbursement. He may have thought he was punishing David, but I didn’t have a spare $80,000 in my checking account. I defaulted, and my credit rating has never really recovered. A few months later, Steve paid the bill, but the damage was done.

It might have been a costly trip, but Jonesy talked John Huang into hosting a fundraiser for Gephardt out in Los Angeles. He could produce $20,000 for a breakfast, nothing to sneeze at for an hour of Gephardt’s time while doing other business in California.

After that event, Jonesy stayed in California to go to some DNC events and raise more money. He FedExed me the checks for the Huang event, some of which I sent off to St. Louis for “Gephardt in Congress,” maybe $25,000. Then I started to process a separate pile of about $30,000 made out to the Effective Government Committee, including more money from John Huang, Jane Huang, and a bunch of their friends that I put aside. In those days, there was no process for vetting donors to ensure they were upstanding U.S. citizens. It’s a standard practice today, but nobody asked questions back then.

I forgot about the separate pile of checks for the EGC. A few months later I went to wash my car. As I pulled the trash out from under the driver’s seat, I found about ten envelopes of checks. Some for Gephardt, some for the DCCC, and a couple for Patrick Kennedy. About $120,000 in misplaced checks were in my car, including those John Huang had bundled. Instead of ’fessing up to being disorganized, I tossed all them into the trash at the car wash. Money was everywhere in politics; nobody would miss that $120,000.

A year later, the John Huang scandal broke to the press. Fundraisers right and left were hauled in to testify before Congress, including DNC finance director Richard Sullivan. After the Huang event in LA, our office was panicked that Gephardt might get caught up in the investigation, potentially ruining his chances at another presidential run. I was panicked for a different reason. The accountants and investigators might look for those missing checks and wonder why I had never deposited them into the Effective Government Committee’s account.

We had only been using one old computer to track our donors, one of those with a yellow screen and a crappy database. It certainly wasn’t hooked up to the Internet. Primitive at best, but it held all our information, including the John Huang California trip. We decided we had no choice. We waited for the sun to go down and took the computer into the back alley behind the office. I took a hockey stick, someone else grabbed a baseball bat. We pulverized that computer into a thousand pieces within a few minutes.

Two days later we get the call from our election attorney: The grand jury investigating the fundraising scandal would like all the documents relating to John Huang. We didn’t have much left, but we sent over what we had.

Everything more or less blew over, though the Huang scandal was a sign of the times. And things were getting out of control. Neither Gephardt nor Jonesy was ever implicated, though we did end up returning three checks to John and Jane Huang, for $6,000, in March 1997.8 Not that many; we couldn’t refund checks that we never cashed.

18

Although President Clinton was focused on raising money for his 1996 reelection and for the DNC, in the name of party unity, he offered to do fundraising days for both House and Senate Democrats. He could not raise for all the members and challengers for the House, so his time went toward raising for the DCCC. The president gave the House Democrats a day for New York, and we had to jump on it. If we knocked it out of the park, it might just be enough to win back the House! That’s what we had convinced ourselves of, and that’s what we sold to donors.

Our goal was $2 million. By this time, that was easy pickings in DC money, but outside of DC was more time consuming. We had two months.

I was assigned as the lead fundraiser for the event. I was pumped. I loved New York, and the chance to redeem myself from my early DNC disaster was motivation enough. I went to work right away and pulled together over two thousand names who I knew could write at least $10,000 each. We booked the top floor of the St. Regis and decided that we should have five hundred people in the room. Individual seats would be $2,500, and $10,000 donors would get access to a pre-event private photo line with the president. Fancy. We hoped to sell a hundred for the photo line and four hundred for dinner, bringing in over $2 million for House Democrats.

I put each of the two thousand names into binders; each name had one page with the name, phone number, address, and as much giving history as I could find. The idea was that I could keep handwritten notes on each sheet of paper: called on this day, left a message on this day, or hopefully committed $10,000 on this date.

DCCC chair Martin Frost—the fundraising machine—committed four hours of call time a day, every day. Martin called and called. I sat with him while he dialed, teeing up the next number as Frost neared the end of the previous conversation. He left messages. If he did not get a call back from his message, he would call the next day. And again. When he got to speak to a potential donor, his script was direct:

We can win the House back, Republicans are evil, we need you to be on the House Democrats’ team. We need you to give $10,000, which will get you a photo with the president and a nice dinner with several members of the House.

It was refreshing because we got an answer right away, which all too often was “I am focused on reelecting the president and I need to put my money into his campaign.” But Martin would not take no for an answer.

Of course, he was also raising for his own reelection, so occasionally he’d modify his pitch: “Can you give me $1,000 and write $10,000 for the DCCC?” Being the DCCC chair, he got to talk with more and more donors and hopefully could bring them into his own campaign’s orbit.

And we had new tools at our disposal: committed time from members of Congress. Since Gephardt and Frost had made it clear that all caucus members had to help us win the House back, we got to take some to visit New York and pitch donors in person. A donor could say no over the phone, but what about sitting face to face? I divided that list of two thousand people and went to work finding meetings.

One of the first of these trips was for Frost. We hopped on the 7 am shuttle, had eight meetings (with a $10,000 ask at each), then grabbed the 9 pm shuttle back. We never gave this kind of attention to DC donors, going around town and spending an hour or two with each. I’d just call them. Welcome to the post-’94 realities of political money.

As soon as we boarded that morning, Frost pestered me for details about each donor. What does he care about? Which firm does she work for? Where do his kids go to school? Has he been to a White House coffee? What type of attorney is she? Who are her clients? I tried my best to answer his questions, but I had no clue about personal details. The only thing I cared about was their giving capacity. It was one thing to sit in a room and make calls with Frost, but spending the next fourteen hours running around New York was going to be a killer.

As the plane taxied down the runway, a gentlemen in front of us leaned back over the seat and said, “Martin, I know you have called me several times and I have just been too busy to call back, I am sorry. Here’s my check.” Super-lobbyist Tony Podesta had been avoiding Frost for weeks, but he was now stuck on a plane with him and he had no way out. Fearful he’d get cornered, he anted up and handed Frost a $1,000 check. This might be the perfect new way to raise new money: Let’s just sit in the Delta shuttle boarding lounge and raise money all day!

Our first meeting was with David Stern, commissioner of the NBA. Martin tried to talk about basketball, but it was a struggle; he came off sounding like he was faking it. Stern shot me a few glances that said “Are you fucking kidding? Stop trying to bullshit me.” I did my best to turn the conversation to winning back the House. That should connect with him—winning and losing—right?

But Stern had something he needed to talk about, the only reason he took the meeting. The NBA was in the midst of a fight with the Federal Communications Commission over broadcasting NBA games. The FCC wasn’t blocking regional games from being shown on local cable networks. This was big money to the NBA; if it could not block local broadcasts of the games, they’d never capitalize on the national TV rights.

Frost wanted that check, so he agreed with Stern. Democrats were with the NBA! (They usually are. The NBA doesn’t have a PAC but its players and executives give the vast majority of their money to Democrats.) Martin didn’t have a clue what he was agreeing with, but he told Stern he’d make sure House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee heard his case. That’s how donor servicing works. Had the NBA headquarters been located in Washington, Stern would have gotten two minutes on the phone in return for $1,000, but because he was in New York, he got an hour for ten grand. I have no clue if it was because we sold him on winning the House back or that Frost promised him action from the committee. I didn’t want to ask.

The day went along like this, meetings for an hour or two. Selling a message of taking back the House registered only if Frost talked about issues: tort reform, tax policy, TV rights. New York donors could not separate money from policy; it was their only reason to invest.

Frost got more and more intense with me as the day went on. He wanted more and more information about each donor. It was killing me. He basically started asking how many paces we had to walk to the next meeting. Not fun. We landed at 10 pm back at National Airport, Frost headed home and I went to 7-Eleven to buy my first-ever pack of cigarettes.

We ended up selling thirty tickets for the private photo line with Clinton and three hundred regular tickets. It was great for the DCCC to raise about $1 million. We missed our $2 million target, but it was still a solid event.

19

Because all members had to raise, I got to spend time on the road with any member who wanted to go raise national money for themselves or the DCCC. I met Massachusetts congressman (and now senator) Ed Markey on a trip to New York, similar to one I had set up with Martin Frost.

What a difference. Ed was remarkably sane, laid back, fun, and although he never said it out loud, he hated these donors as much as I did. He made those trips because he wanted to be back in the majority.

We ran around New York that first trip: the president of USA Networks, David Stern again, executive David Shaw, and so on. They were typical big-money donors, but Ed stood his ground on his principles. I loved it. We had a dinner set up, but Ed had a different idea. The Big East basketball tournament was going on down at Madison Square Garden, and “Really, Lindsay, wouldn’t that be more fun?” I agreed! It would! Ed made a few calls, and we ended up sitting in floor seats for the two evening games. That’s my kind of fundraising.

Then Ed really figured things out. He wanted to go visit his wife’s family out in Palo Alto, California. Perhaps he could do some fundraising on that trip? So I set it up, a week in California for us both, paid for by the DCCC. He wanted some “downtime,” too, so I didn’t over-schedule. Most of the meetings I did manage to wrangle ended up being canceled, so out of twelve meetings, we made five.

But don’t worry, we justified our time. First we went down to the construction site of the new baseball stadium in San Francisco. Ed found a couple workers and asked them to show us where home plate would be. It was awesome.

The San Francisco Giants still played games out at Candlestick Park, so since we decided we were now fans, we went to the next four games. At one point we actually walked up to the Pacific Bell luxury box and knocked on the door. Who knew, maybe they would give some money? Nobody answered, but at least we tried.

Sooner or later, I started taking heat from the DCCC about how much I had raised. The committee was a little touchy, since we had spent over $20,000 that week on flights, car service, hotels, and meals. Surely one week in California would have brought in a couple hundred thousand? Nope. Nada. I had nothing to show for it. But no worries. I explained I needed to host an event to collect all the checks. So we set up a fundraising lunch for five weeks down the road with a goal of $250,000. I decided to stay in San Francisco and checked into a room at the St. Regis for the next month.

I went around town every day meeting with donors, kissing ass, and begging for checks. I didn’t have anybody to help: no call time from a member, no more congressional visits. But I worked it, and I lined up Northern California Democrats to be honorary chairs of the event: Nancy Pelosi and Anna Eshoo. The former California Senate champion, Willie Brown, would be an honorary chair.

Willie was at that time the mayor of San Francisco. I didn’t know him but I loved what I’d heard; he was a character out of a long-ago political novel. When I asked him about being an honorary chair for my event, he said didn’t give a damn, all it meant was that he would have to show up to a lunch. He only had a few minutes to give me, but in those few seconds, he gave me his number one rule: “The Willie Brown dating rule of 70.” If you take your age and you add the age of the person you are dating, it should not exceed 70. Willie was about fifty at the time, so guess how old his girlfriends were.

Thanks to Willie, my St. Regis event sold out, raised over $300,000, and probably saved my ass.

I returned to DC after that month on the road and was given one week to prepare for a day trip to Miami with Gephardt. Tired but ready to roll, I grabbed all the names I could and started making calls. One week wasn’t enough time to set up a fundraising event, so I went for the wealthiest individuals most likely to write a check.

I was able to finagle four meetings for Miami but wasn’t sure if they’d bring in much cash. Since I wasn’t given that much time to prepare, though, I would be forgiven. Boarding the 7 am flight to Miami, Dick Gephardt in tow, I had an odd sense of calm starting out on what would be the strangest twelve hours of my young fundraising life.

Our first meeting was at the airport as soon as we landed. Vivian Mannerud met us at the gate and escorted us through the airport into a private office in the terminal. She handed over two boxes of Cuban cigars. Gephardt refused to touch them. Since not a single ethics rule pertained to a campaign staffer like me, I stuffed them into my briefcase.

Vivian went on and on about the need to open direct flights from mainland USA to Cuba. She owned a charter flight business that ran daily routes from Miami to Havana, but in order to comply with the law, her planes couldn’t fly direct. They had to land in Honduras and take off for Cuba after a few minutes on the ground.

She handed over three $10,000 checks, $30,000 for the various accounts we funded. Thirty thousand dollars and two boxes of Cuban cigars seemed like a pretty good deal for forty-five minutes of our time. The moment struck me. Here was a wealthy individual who had just made a strong case for specific legislation that would benefit her business directly, and she had combined her request with a political contribution. Even the NBA commissioner, David Stern, who had asked Martin Frost to investigate an FCC ruling, had only committed to writing a $10,000 check; he hadn’t handed it over on the spot. Willie Runyon had asked Gephardt to look into a Medicare audit, not change the law. Vivian Mannerud was putting in an ask with her money and clearly expecting something in return.

Rich donors get to spend real time with elected officials and make specific requests, yet the so-called influence peddlers in Washington never got the same opportunity: a direct quid pro quo.

We jumped into our Carey Limousine outside the airport and headed up to Palm Beach for lunch. Convinced our lunch date would result in at least $100,000, we arrived at an obnoxious mansion on the water, owned by a man I’ll call Bob Walsh. I’d never seen such a place in my life. Bob lived primarily out of state and made a fortune in government contracting. I thought he might be our next Willie Runyon! All those folks cashing in off the government’s dime seemed to have money to give.

The driver had to buzz just to open the gate in front of the driveway. Gephardt looked at me with his wry smile; clearly he thought we’d hit pay dirt. A burly older man greeted us in jeans and a blue sweatshirt. He walked us around the house; it took about thirty minutes. There were rooms for everything: a gym overlooking the ocean, three libraries, twelve bedrooms, and a TV studio. Every single one of them exceeded the size of my apartment. We sat down in one of his libraries to discuss his life, his business, and to get to the chase: How much was he going to fork over?

For nearly an hour, he explained that he was under investigation for contracting “issues” and he just was not in a position to donate, claiming poverty. Huh? It would be more productive for him to focus his efforts on the feds, not politics. He spilled his guts, trying to garner a sympathetic response from Gephardt and maybe an offer of help, though he insisted a donation was not on the table. He should probably not be giving when under suspicion, but he should have never agreed to meet with us in the first place either. The clock was ticking. He had now taken over ninety minutes of Gephardt’s time, an amount of time nobody else in Washington would ever get to discuss their problems.

Bob suggested we have lunch. We couldn’t really leave, although I wished we had, because it was obvious no money was going to come of this. I whispered to Gephardt that it better be the most expensive, best lunch we had ever had.

We walked into an enormous dining room with a table that could easily sit fifty. Four place settings were laid at one end. I became excited; four settings meant someone else was joining us. Maybe his wife? Maybe we could convince her to write a check?

A nice gentleman with long white gloves and butler tails came out to take our order. The choice was turkey or meatloaf. All three of us chose turkey, and Bob said that Poodles would have meatloaf. That was a cute name for his wife, I thought.

We chatted more about contracting and the prospects for future reforms while I salivated over the thought of a homemade Thanksgiving feast. It was not to be. Minutes later, the butler returned with four Hungry Man TV dinners, still covered in tin foil. He placed one in front of me, peeled back the foil, and explained that in this section was turkey, next was peas, and over here were the mashed potatoes.

What the fuck had I done?

The butler set the fourth meal on the table, and Bob called for Poodles. I heard a light clanging noise down the hallway and imagined his wife’s expensive jewelry jiggling together. Then I heard his wife breathing somewhat heavily on top of the pitter patter of her four tiny feet. Wait, Poodles wasn’t his wife but his French poodle, who happily jumped onto the table and tore into his meatloaf lunch.

To review, as I sat there with the Democratic leader of the House, potentially the next Speaker of the House, we were eating TV dinners with a dog. Fundraising at its best. I kept my head low on the return to DC, sure that this was not the best day Gephardt had ever had on the road.

20

Jack Abramoff and his associates ended up in jail for laundering political money from (and scamming) several Indian tribes and then for bribing members of Congress. Jack has maintained that he was just part of the system of lobbying. He is just plain wrong: He was a criminal who took the existing system of donating and lobbying to a new, illegal level. He is not, as he wants to imply, just one of many. Most lobbyists operate legally, but Jack was unique in exploiting the newfound thirst, on both sides of the aisle, for more campaign cash. His desire to bribe the likes of Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) would not have been possible twenty years earlier, when the amount of money funding campaigns was so limited that Abramoff wouldn’t have had access to enough cash to make a difference.

Through a men’s ice hockey league, I’d been casual friends with Tony Rudy, one of Abramoff’s associates who had gone to jail and had been a former chief of staff to Tom DeLay—the Republican leader whose conviction in connection with the scandal was eventually overturned. Tony and I played on the same team for a season or two. He was a smart, funny, good guy, and I liked him even more for despising some of the same people I did.

I was always clear to Tony that Jack was a complete scumbag. To this day, Tony tries to blame the lobbying profession for his mistakes. But in all my years of raising money, I’ve never met another lobbyist who was a criminal. Jack was, and he deserved to be punished much worse.

The one thing missing from all those congressional hearings, investigations, and sensational press stories was the fact that Democrats led the charge to get money from Native American tribal interests. It started slow in 1992, ’93, and ’94, mostly focused on Southern California tribes. We would take Gephardt out a few times a year, and they’d host a large fundraiser. Congressman Dale Kildee (D-MI) had introduced us to tribal money. Dale sat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, which basically had jurisdiction over Native American issues. The tribes had lobbied him, and he had become a champion of tribal self-rule.

But one of our first meetings was in Connecticut, with a few leaders whose tribes had established casinos on their reservations. Casinos provided jobs to long-suffering tribal members. And to protect their interests, they’d started giving the likes of Dale Kildee money. Tribes around the country that did not have casinos eventually got them, and we put the squeeze on for campaign cash for House Democrats. It was easy for us to make the ask: The federal government had granted you the right to have a casino, we represent the federal government, pay up. By 1996, we could get $150,000 to $200,000 a year from the tribes, their consultants, and their political friends. Some gave to protect themselves against competition, others gave to avoid or cut off the talk of federal taxes on casino winnings. It was easy to make the case for the tribal leaders to give; they had made so much money in a short period of time and we (Congress) had the power to cut that flow off.

By this point, we had taken on Patrick Kennedy as Dick Gephardt’s political son. Dick’s Hill staff watched over Kennedy’s votes as a member, and we watched over his fundraising. In the summer of 1996, we decided to create a joint fundraising operation and do a little tour around the country. We started in Boston, then went to Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Boston was to capture the Kennedy money; Seattle and San Diego were all about Indian tribal cash; and Los Angeles was so Gephardt could appear as the first guest on the new Al Franken TV show.

We raised a decent chunk in Boston and flew to Seattle. There we spent all day with the tribes from lunch through dinner, with about fifteen tribal leaders from the three or four big Native American casinos in Washington State. They complained about the Interior Department’s bureaucracy that prevented them from growing their casinos.

Both Patrick and Dick played nice all day and feigned interest in their concerns. Dick never asked how much we raised; he never ever cared. It’s what I loved about the guy; he knew he had to do these meetings, but that didn’t mean he had to care about the details.

We picked up over $50,000 that day, $25,000 for Patrick, $25,000 for Gephardt. Then Patrick, his fundraiser Jamie Whitehead, Dick, and I jumped onto a private plane to fly down to San Diego for the next tribal meeting. It was not the fastest plane in the world and had to stop in Fresno for fuel. We landed in San Diego at 12:30 am and got to the hotel at 1:15. We had to leave by 6:00 to drive out to the tribes for a 7 o’clock breakfast. It was going to be a short rest, but you have to take money meetings when the funders are available.

Patrick Kennedy’s crew took care of me in return, of course. Since they were sharing fundraising office space with us, I spent a lot of time with his staff, especially Tony Marcella. Tony was supposed to be Patrick’s guardian, but he really just enabled Patrick’s youthful indiscretions.

One afternoon, Tony was in the office doing some planning work with Patrick’s fundraiser, Jamie. Tony came out and asked me for a favor. As I was an ever-eager liberal, any request from a Kennedy was hard to turn down. Tony wanted me to go to Georgetown to a bar called the Library on M Street and ask for Vinnie. Tony gave me an envelope of cash and said Vinnie would hand me a bag. I just needed to bring the bag back.

I was now a drug dealer. This deal went on for a few months, not every week, but more like two or three times a month. This was toward the end of 1996, and to thank me, Tony put me on retainer with Patrick’s leadership PAC for $3,000 a month. I never saw what was in the bag, but I was pulling down a nice check for a few hours of work a month. Fundraising consulting can be fruitful at times.

21

As the 1996 election drew closer, David Jones was under pressure to produce more money for the DCCC. He told me to come up with $50,000 that week. I had only one person I could call, Willie Runyon.

“Willie, this moment is so important for House Democrats. We need to take back the House, and we could use your help. Can I count on you, Willie? Can your friend Dick Gephardt count on you? Can I, your friend, count on you to come through for the sake of American democracy?”

“Fuuuuck no! Quit begging, it’s pathetic. All you do is ask me for cash!” I had never met this side of Willie and I sure didn’t enjoy it. I had no response. There’s just not much to say when a powerful, wealthy donor is tearing into you, especially when, after all, I was asking him for money.

After Willie vented, he calmed down and started to cut a deal with me.

“Here’s the thing,” he began, “I’ve been cutting you so many checks that I’ve started to feel really bad when my staff asks for a raise and I can’t give it to them.” Point: Willie. “But if we can keep this hush-hush, I can probably still help.”

Okay, I was listening.

“Drive to Baltimore and meet me on the corner of Pratt and Nelson Boulevard. Call me from one of the corner pay phones.”

Shady corner drops and pay phones? I had no choice. Tapped out everywhere else and on a short deadline, I had to do it. I told David that if he never saw me again, I had appreciated all he had done for me. He had no clue what I was saying and went back to making calls.

I went up to Baltimore, parked, and made my call.

“Wait on the corner, and when an ambulance pulls up, get in the back.”

Holy shit. But whatever, I’d wait.

Ten minutes later, one of Willie’s ambulances pulled up. Everything looked safe, so I ambled up to the back door and knocked.

“Come on in!” It was Willie, all right. And there he was, lying on the gurney, smoking his pipe, in a suit. Great. I settled in to start begging for money in the back of an ambulance. Willie complained about his staff and their requested raises. He complained about Medicare, Medicaid, and anything else he could think of. I sat on the edge of the gurney and just soaked it all in.

He was paying for the right to get his speech out. He asked me how to make the check out, and I told him DCCC. He pulled out a blank check and wrote $50,000. I smiled, thanked him, and jumped out of the back of the ambulance, pipe smoke billowing behind me. I can only imagine what witnesses must have thought: that I had just spent five minutes in the back of a smoking ambulance, in my suit.

I had done my job.

22

David Jones was the national finance director and I was the deputy national finance director. David thought it was time to make us sound more important. When a “finance director” calls, it’s always to ask for money. But we could get our foot in the door more easily with better titles. David became chairman and I became chief of staff. Yep, my new business card had a picture of the U.S. Capitol and the title read “Chief of Staff.”

It worked like a charm. I would meet with donors in New York, California, and Las Vegas, and no one outside DC knew the difference. Of course, Steve Elmendorf had just been promoted to Gephardt’s chief of staff, so I didn’t hand out that card in DC for fear of it getting back to Steve. One day, Gephardt saw what I was handing out and just burst out laughing. He knew what I was doing, but he didn’t care.

I must have handed out several hundred of these cards over the course of a year. One day the phone rang at my “Chief of Staff” office on 7th Street. It was the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s Senate leader and he became quite insistent that we meet, today. Puerto Rico had some serious budget issues, and the Senate leader wanted to make his case with Leader Gephardt’s chief of staff.

The smart thing would have been to direct him to Steve, but I played the role I had put myself in and gave him the address to my office. He showed up with a ten-person entourage and pleaded for budgetary relief; I nodded relentlessly, no clue what he was talking about.

Eventually, a member of his entourage asked a very simple question: Why was the leader’s chief of staff’s office not located in the Capitol? Good question! I responded that my office was under construction and I was using this temporarily.

Steve found out about my new business card—well, he found out after one year—and in an angry call told me to destroy them. After that, I just kept them at home and handed them out on the road only.

David Jones wound up hiring one of our young, eager Georgetown students who started as an intern. In week one, we gave him the task of tracking down some checks from Richard Medley in New York. Richard was one of the outside financial advisors for George Soros and others and had helped make Soros a very, very rich man through currency trading. I had actually met Richard as a kid when he worked with my father on the House Banking Committee.

This young fundraiser was supposed to see Richard to pick up about $10,000 for Gephardt. When our colleague called Richard’s office to set up the meeting, Richard’s assistant said that he would not be in that day. Richard had mentored and supported a poor neighborhood kid, who had been hit by a car and died that day.

A tragic moment for anybody. But being young and not wanting to disappoint Jonesy and me, our colleague was not convinced that Richard’s excuse—death—was valid enough. He thought Richard might have been trying to give him the slip to avoid making the donation. So our colleague called Richard back and left a voicemail: “I am sorry for your loss, if he really did die, that is. I would like to still come by and pick up the checks, perhaps later today?”

Richard never gave the money. He was not happy.

When we did road trips for money, we had to send the schedule to Mr. Gephardt’s Capitol Hill office days in advance. This was both so the staff knew how to prepare him for the upcoming meetings and so we could prove we had filled the time. I had one trip upcoming to New York, but the afternoon time slot still said “to be announced.” This set a panic through Gephardt’s office.

When the staff pressed me to fill the time, I tossed out names: Bloomberg, Felix Rohatyn, Ed Koch—any name I could come up with for that 3 pm slot. Truth was I had already arranged for a meeting with Geoff Bible, CEO of Philip Morris. Tobacco had become toxic for Democrats and the scapegoat for many corporate bad actors. But thanks to Martin Frost’s neuroses, the staff knew I loved tobacco of all sorts and had become friends with Philip Morris’s chief lobbyist. I knew Gephardt wouldn’t care if we met with them.

Elmendorf called every few hours; what’s up with that meeting time? I kept repeating that I was just waiting for a response from Bloomberg. Off to New York we went, and the schedule still said “TBA at 3 pm.” We walked into Mr. Bible’s office. The fruit bowl was filled with packs of cigs, and I helped myself to a few. We chatted about how insane the hearings against big tobacco had gotten. Mr. Bible reminded us of how many jobs big tobacco provided. It was an honest conversation, much more so than sitting with a wealthy liberal person who couldn’t relate to the working class. Philip Morris employed the working class, and its leadership actually understood their needs a lot better than you’d think. Tobacco companies and employees had been strong supporters of Democrats up until that year. They never would be again, and I am almost certain this was the last meeting ever between a Democratic leader and a big tobacco CEO.

The DC office was not pleased with me. It was a matter of time before I would be shown the door. I still had David Jones to protect me, but he was inching his way out also. Steve made a change to Gephardt’s travel after this; he hired a young kid, Charles Jefferson, to always be with Gephardt. It was solely so Charles could tell Steve everything we did, whom we met with, and what was said.

I didn’t really have an issue with that, I knew I was on my way out. But what really bothered me was the cost: We now had to pay for another plane ticket, another hotel room, another meal. Over twenty-five trips a year, that added up to over $100,000 in new campaign costs, just so Steve could keep his power.

23

We put everything into winning the House back in 1996. We sold the new class of rich donors we’d discovered on that idea, and we promised them we could pull it off. We raised a lot of money from them. We didn’t win back the House, but we kept on working them. They gave money because we spent time with them and gave them access to the top party leaders; they gave because we told them we would win. This new band of donors was not well-organized, yet.

Bill Clinton won handily that fall. A big part of that win was the early money Clinton raised and spent right away on TV advertising. His campaign had been able to “define” Bob Dole (that is, tell the public what they should think of him) before Dole had raised much money. This was a lesson that all candidates have since learned: Raise early, define your opponent, and win. President Obama’s campaign used that strategy perfectly in 2012 against Mitt Romney, a playbook the Clinton/Gore team designed in 1995.

Terry McAuliffe was still running the money show for the DNC. Raising money is what he knew, and he used his access to the White House to create a reason for wealthy donors to give early. The scandals linked to him have been covered well: the White House coffees, stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, Chinese money through John Huang, and so on. What hasn’t been covered well is the brewing behind-the-scenes frustration among elite liberal billionaires. They didn’t have much in common with Terry and didn’t like the more centrist tone coming from Bill Clinton. Most of them had taken the opportunity to go to White House coffees or other private events, but they didn’t feel embraced by Clinton.

For many of them, Terry was the problem. He had opened fundraising up to pro-business Democrats. The elite liberal donors would show up in a room with eight or nine other people from the business community, industry leaders who happened to lean left but who didn’t share the ideals of a utopian liberal government with the likes of George Soros and other billionaires. It wasn’t enough to have a Democratic president if the White House didn’t push for a liberal utopian agenda. The billionaire takeover of the Democratic Party started in 1996 because they didn’t like being a part of the corporate class of donors Terry built.

So they pulled back in the years following the 1996 election and reassessed how to take over the Democratic Party. Some helped Gore in 2000, but only a few. They had been meeting behind closed doors to come up with a way to drive the Democratic Party toward their personal agendas. It would take them ten years to figure out how to organize this effort, but by 2006 they would succeed.

More on that later.

24

We had been doing so much fundraising that it was getting harder and harder to get people to show up for Gephardt’s big event every year in DC. Yet again, we had to get creative. I wanted people to still think the event was special, just like back in early 1995 when the entire Democratic DC community showed up. The president was grabbing all the attention. It was now 1997, and I knew I was about to leave Gephardt. His staff was going the wrong way, and any future run for president did not look bright.

How could we stand out? We had raised so much money and didn’t have much left to squeeze out of the DC crowd. The maximum amount a Democrat could get from every political action committee in town had swelled to $1.2 million, but that upper limit was mostly confined to senators who really worked for it. House members could squeeze $300,000 to $400,000 out of two years of fundraising from PACs and another $100,000 in direct checks from lobbyists. Still only half of what senators got, and with a House campaign running around $700,0009 by the 1997–1998 cycle, that was a lot of money to make up through rich folks.

Since Gephardt was the leader and because he had worked the community so hard, he could garner closer to that $1.2 million out of DC PACs. We had raised over $1 million of it already by the winter of 1997. I was stuck on how to hit my previous high-water mark of $500,000 for Gephardt’s one big annual event. Worried there weren’t enough dollars available in DC, I had to step up my game. The president was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, but still he was the president. The DC donor community loved a good party and still wanted to see Bill Clinton. His most loyal friends at his lowest point in political life were the DC Democratic donors.

Following the Lincoln Bedroom and John Huang fundraising scandals of 1996, the president demanded background checks on all his donors. Everyone who attended a private event with him had to supply their Social Security number and date of birth. The White House and DNC had set up a compliance office, and they ran checks on each RSVP. Not that it really prevented any scandals, but it suggested the president was at least trying.

There’s no reason President Clinton would show up for one event just for Gephardt. Dick had no challenger, didn’t need the money, and the relationship between the Hill and the White House was frosty. But to raise more money from DC donors, I decided to imply that the president was coming to Gephardt’s event. That would surely get some extra donors to turn up. At the bottom of the invite, I added: “VIP to Attend, Social Security number and date of birth must be submitted three days prior to event for all guests.”

It worked like magic. I sold tickets to folks I’d never known to give money before. Typical donors who’d shown up in years past bought two tickets: one extra for the spouse, significant other, or mistress. Not many asked who the mystery VIP guest was, but they all assumed he lived in the White House. I sold out over five hundred $1,000 tickets in a matter of two weeks. The event would be packed.

Now I just needed to come up with my VIP. Convinced I’d be quitting soon, I decided to make my statement about how ridiculous the fundraising game had become. I got my VIP.

The event was at the Navy Memorial museum on Pennsylvania Avenue. I thought the proximity to the White House would continue the charade that President Clinton would make the quick walk over. The place had two large rooms next to the exhibits. We set up the food around the outside next to the exhibits with a photo line into each room. The first room featured Dick and Jane Gephardt. Stand in line, have a picture with them, and then proceed to the next room for a photo with the VIP.

My VIP got some laughs, caused some consternation, and aroused some pure shock.

I had hired an Elvis impersonator. Everyone got a picture with him, but you had to wait until he sang “Viva Las Vegas” first.

25

By mid-1997, David Jones left Gephardt. He would stay involved as a consultant (the wave of the future!) but not run the show full time. Jonesy sensed I was never going to stick around, so he hired a few fundraisers under us, including a young surfer kid from California, Noah Mamet. From day one, Noah, with his slender face and jet black perfect hair, exuded the unique quality all good fundraisers share: bullshit.

Noah had no clue about what was important to a movement that had gotten Gephardt to the leadership position: the working class, and a well-honed partnership between unions and business. Born and raised in LA, Noah had cut his teeth as a West Coast liberal elite, working in California Democratic politics. He only wanted to go after big money, Hollywood donors—people like him. He was the poster child of the new money game. It’s who he was, where he was from. It wasn’t his fault. But Noah’s donors wanted influence, so they sucked up the most precious quantity of politicians who begged them for money: time.

With David leaving, Steve Elmendorf had to decide who would take over for David Jones and run the money machine. Steve set up separate meetings with Noah and me; we’d each get one hour to make our pitch. Noah did his song and dance about building a national big donor network. Hollywood types, trial attorneys, and business executives in cities like New York, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, and Miami. He wanted to spend time and grant access to a small group of 100 or 150 people, with the hope that each would write and raise $50,000 or $100,000 for the next big campaign, whether that was Gephardt for president or another run at the majority, which would make Dick Speaker of the House.

Steve’s watch must have been broken, because my hour was twenty minutes long. I knew Steve wanted Noah, but I wanted to use my time to make a point about how to change a fundraising system that had spun out of control. My pitch went something like this:

Dick Gephardt is the champion of the middle class, but he understands business too. Together, that’s what makes America tick. Incredibly rich donors understand only themselves, what they need to get ahead. Gephardt isn’t one of them, but we—the Gephardt team, and others—have helped give the super-wealthy more control over the system than they’ve ever had. They needed to be put in check. Gephardt can relate to them only because he understands how to use power, and he wants to use it to help the middle class and the companies that create strong relationships with their employees.

If Gephardt still wants to be president, he doesn’t need a hundred mega-donors but a million union members and middle-class Americans giving him a hundred bucks each. Raising $100 million for a presidential run from average folks would be the greatest statement in politics, and the one guy who could pull that off is Dick Gephardt. So let’s spend the next few years working the 14 million union members and the corporate leaders who have productive relationships with them, and we might just build the ultimate national partnership, one that checks the power of big donors.

It wasn’t much of a decision. Steve had no clue what I was talking about. He wanted the big money. Steve wanted Noah. Noah would do Steve’s bidding. That’s the only thing Steve seemed to care about—his own success, not his boss’s, or what Dick Gephardt represented. I knew I wouldn’t win him over, but when he didn’t even spend some time thinking about the prospect of small donors delivering a winning team, I was sad. Not for myself but because I knew at the end of those twenty minutes that Dick Gephardt, my hero, would never be President of the United States and he would never be Speaker of the House.

Noah got the job and Steve had his puppet. Dick would run for president in 2004, but he would not raise much money at all, “just” $21.6 million, least out of the four main Democratic candidates in the primary. For somebody who had run before and had raised so much for House Democrats, it was a pitiful showing. I could have told you in 1997 that his next presidential run would flame out. Gephardt didn’t understand what he was doing by surrounding himself with the likes of Noah and Steve, operatives who didn’t understand what Gephardt represented. I did, and that’s why it was clear Dick Gephardt’s career was on the downslope.

Now I had to figure out how to make a difference and find a new horse. Gephardt was finished as the champion of the little people.