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Like honorariums, campaign money follows power. Of the $172.4 million in political action committee contributions in 1988, fully 70% went to incumbents. Nor did the money stop flowing when the election was over: $2.4 million went to incumbents after last Nov. 9. Senate Finance chairman Lloyd Bentsen collected the most PAC money -- $2.4 million -- demonstrating that he didn't really need to organize that $10,000 breakfast club. Richard Gephardt, Tom Foley's probable replacement as Democratic majority leader, led House members with $610,107. Agriculture Committee member Bill Emerson followed with $579,478, Tom Foley with $575,086, and minority leader Robert Michel with $555,340. Banking Committee member David Dreier, New York's Stephen Solarz and the ever prosperous Dan Rostenkowski all have more than $1 million in their campaign treasuries.
, Perhaps the worst part of the current culture is the amount of time and attention elected officials lavish not on the general public but on people who can lavish money on them. Members of Congress take to calling their contributors friends. The confusion makes for some convoluted rationalizations. A friend, the reasoning goes, can cut a member in on a lucrative investment, treat him to a luxurious vacation and supply him with cash, not because he has an interest in a one-line amendment to a bill that will save his industry millions of dollars, but because he is, well, a friend. Perhaps Tony Coelho really believed it when he said that junk-bond wizard Michael Milken "is constantly thinking about what can be done to make this a better world." Now under indictment, Milken faces the prospect of doing his thinking in prison.
Eventually a legislator finds it easier to understand the plight of the constituent-friend who would be hurt by a bill cracking down on reckless savings and loan executives than the plight of a constituent he does not know -- Joe Sixpack faithfully depositing his weekly savings into a 5% passbook account. When friends of Wright and Coelho who were heading up failing S & Ls came under investigation for fraud, the Democratic leaders were not only willing to take their calls and visits but to stall legislation and a federal investigation that would have cracked down on these people.
As more and more thrift executives got into trouble in 1987 and 1988, S & L PACs simply stepped up their campaign giving; by the time Washington finally got around to addressing the S & L crisis this year, the cost of a bailout had swollen to an outrageous $158 billion or more over the next eleven years. Over the past three elections, according to the Wall Street Journal, the S & Ls gave $4.5 million to the members of Congress willing to protect them. House Banking Committee member Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican who refuses to take PAC money, believes this may be the disgrace that brings down the current congressional establishment. "We're looking at an eleven-figure fraud story that's bigger than Teapot Dome," he says.