Bloggers v. ADN - John Dean's Broken Government - Don Young's Lobbyist Friends

This isn't about Wrangell-St. Elias, but I did say I'd started reading John Dean's book Broken Government. (He was selling copies when he spoke to the Alaska Democratic Convention.) Being out of wifi range since Thursday, I have some catching up to do. This morning I caught the front page of yesterday's Anchorage Daily News. Last night I'd read Phil Munger's Progressive Alaska chiding of MSM reporters for missing things that bloggers were getting.

These all tie in together nicely.
First, while the rivalry between some bloggers and the ADN probably makes everyone better reporters, we bloggers need to remember that the reporters have stories to report every damn day. They can't just throw up some pretty pictures of flowers or fish as filler. Just because they miss a story that one of us gets is no reason to pound them. They aren't the enemy. Even the ADN is not the enemy, though if the ADN is missing stories it has more to do with how they are allocating their resources as they face their financial struggles as a print medium in a digital age. I've spent plenty of blog space on that topic already.

Good natured rivalries like UCLA-USC, Yankees-Red Sox make everyone play a little harder and better, but the reporters don't have near the freedom bloggers have to shoot back at us. [Tuesday: Actually, Kyle Hopkins blogs on the ADN website and Robert Dillon has his own blog where he responded strongly to Phil's post. Phil responded to this post in a comment below and to this and Dillon's response on his blog today.] And we really are allies in a larger battle to get news out. If the kind of comments Phil is making here gets the ADN management to give more resources to political reporting, good. But if this friendly sniping gets old for the already beleaguered reporters, then we might lose some of the cooperation that we've had - help getting our computers into the trials, tips on stories they can't run, etc. - then that would be bad.

Anyway, in response to Phil, I wanted to commend Sean Cockerham and Erika Bolstad's Sunday story on Don Young's lobbying money , which shows that they are digging and bringing to light information Alaska voters should know.

I would like to borrow some words from the John Dean book to add some context to their story which tells how a Young staffer raised $90,000 by emailing 20 lobbyists.

This comes from John Dean's Broken Government from pages 48-49. Dean's been quoting several different observers of how Congress has changed under Republican rule. Here he's talking about lobbying.

Wolfe, too expressed concern about the vital part of the corrupting machinery, the infamous K Street Project, named after the street where many lobbyists have their offices, which "was designed not only to allow lobbyists to make contributions to legislators in return for laws that benefit themselves - this has always been part of the politics of democracy - but to transform lobbying , which has usually been understood as bipartisan in nature, into an arm of one political party; in return for access to government, Republicans insisted that lobbying groups fire Democrats from their leadership positions and replace them with Republicans."

Recognizing the damage that the Abramoff plea had done to the K Street Project, Wolfe observed that "although Democrats will surely insist that lobbyists stop hiring only members of the majority party, no one seriously expects that lobbying will return to its once bipartisan days." Wolfe's concerns, expressed in 2006, were well placed.

Althought the Republicans are keeping tight-lipped about it, I am told that the K Street crowd is doing everything possible to help get Republicans back in control of Congress. They dream of returning to those days when the GOP ran Congress, and GOP leaders like Tom DeLay boasted that he had lobbying firms writing the laws.

[This is one long paragraph in the book. I've chopped it up to make it easier to read on the screen and added emphasis. 'Wolfe' refers to Alan Wolfe and his Washington Monthly (July/August 2006) article "Why Conservatives Can't Govern."]

In the Cockerham/Bolstad article, the Young staff response is that these are all close friends, so it's ok to ask for money, they are helping a friend, not buying influence.

Anderson, Young's chief of staff, said Young doesn't make decisions based on lobbying and his relationship with Alcalde is personal.

"If Rick Alcalde could talk to you on the phone he would tell you that when he was a youngster and so forth he was kind of a rabble-rouser and everything else. The Youngs looked out for him," Anderson said. "And that goes back to the relationship the Youngs have with Mr. Alcalde, with Hector, (Rick's) father and his mother. When Rick went through some tough times and so forth the Youngs were there to help him, to kind of give him some of that guidance he needed. ... Rick credits the Youngs with being a mentor."

While I have no doubt that these people are long time friends (after all Young has been Congressman 35 years now), and some would help him even if he were not a Congressman, the whole explanation is ludicrous. He doesn't make decisions based on lobbying? Then why are all his clients paying them handsomely to talk to Young? Explaining the closeness of the personal relationship only helps explain why people pay these guys to lobby.

The scary part is that Anderson takes this all so for granted that he doesn't realize how damning his explanation is. Pete Kott and Vic Kohring both thought that their friendship with Bill Allen made everything ok, even after being convicted. "He gave us money because we were friends, not because we were legislators he wanted to influence." Tom Anderson, while appearing to have a little more sense of the problem at his sentencing statement to the court, also had trouble confusing friends and lobbyists.

As I'm reading the Dean book, the problem I'm pondering is this: Much of what Dean says is pretty available knowledge. Most people have at least a vague understanding of many of the problems. But they either dismiss the stories that weaken their own ideology or they claim that it's a problem for both parties, or that it can't be changed. If a Democrat makes the charge - well she's got a partisan vested interest. If a former Republican insider like Dean makes the charges, well, he's a disgruntled turncoat. What does it take to get a significant part of the population to get it? Or is the distraction industry - sports, video games, celebrity gossip, etc. - too powerful for people to attend to protecting the US Constitution?