Looking back to Abramoff's youth
With his menu of guilty pleas this week, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff seems a high-profile embarrassment for former friends in the GOP leadership. But party veterans from the Reagan era recall that Abramoff's Washington career was actually launched, in part, by creating headaches for top GOP brass.
In the early '80s, when the Republican National Committee was controlled by moderates allied with Vice President George H.W. Bush, Abramoff infuriated party leaders by transforming the College Republicans into a hard-right version of a communist cell -- complete with loyalty purges and missions to destroy political enemies.
''We probably made it very dictatorial," Abramoff later conceded in an interview. ''But we wanted the College Republicans to remain conservative."
Abramoff was chairman of the College Republicans, and his lieutenants were Harvard graduate Grover Norquist, who rose to political fame as president of the American Taxpayers Association, and a young Georgia student named Ralph Reed, who would later become the face of the Christian Coalition.
In a memo from the time, Abramoff counseled his troops: ''It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."
Their favorite movie was ''Patton", based on the bellicose World War II general's life. Abramoff & Co. would pump up the College Republicans' field organizers by forcing them to memorize George C. Scott's key speech in the movie, substituting ''Democrat" for ''Nazi": ''The Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood! Shoot them in the belly!"
Party leaders were appalled by the trio's over-the-top antics (''You choose your words carelessly -- the goal is to win, not to incite," complained one Republican National Committee official) and their lavish spending (''totally irresponsible fiscally," said another). After running out of money, Abramoff set up an allegedly nonpartisan group called USA Foundation to solicit tax deductible money from New Right donors.
President Reagan was the College Republicans' hero, but his handlers wouldn't grant the young activists access -- even excluding them from a birthday party that featured hundreds of supporters. When Abramoff begged for a presidential appearance at a College Republican anniversary, his consolation prize was the embodiment of the political moderation he despised: Vice President Bush.
Abramoff was also notorious in Washington for his efforts to cut Democratic lobbyists out of lucrative business under a Republican-controlled White House and Congress. But two sons of the lawmaker who was the scion of the Democratic Party during the Reagan era are doing just fine on K Street.
O'Neill III sets up a new shingle
Thomas P. O'Neill III, the state's former lieutenant governor and a son of the late House Speaker, opened a branch of his Beacon Hill lobby shop in Washington a few months ago, headed by a former National Transportation Safety Board official, Peter Goelz, and is planning an expansion.
Business has been good: O'Neill's firm, which houses two Big Dig lobbyists, John D. Cahill and Andrew M. Paven, pushed Massachusetts state interests through the transportation bill recently signed into law.
Doesn't a D.C. office bring O'Neill into direct competition with his brother, Christopher ''Kip" O'Neill, whose longtime Washington lobby shop, at $12 million in billings, ranks 90th in town, according to the Center for Public Integrity?
''No," insisted Tom O'Neill. ''We've been pretty steadfast to make sure neither gets in each other's way."
Tom O'Neill, whose white mane makes him a dead ringer for his late father, maintains a higher media profile, and admits to missing life in politics. Kip O'Neill keeps his name out of the press, but still runs a PAC for Democratic candidates named after his father, which in 2004 doled out nearly $24,000.
But on one project the O'Neill brothers are working on, in unison: They have begun organizing a June ceremony at which the Big Dig's main artery will be officially named the ''Thomas P. 'Tip' O'Neill Tunnel" after the lawmaker who helped secure billions of federal dollars for the project. Bush Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has committed to be on hand.
Ex-professor to take on Alito
Among those who will testify against Samuel A. Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court this week is a retired Northeastern University law professor, John G. S. Flym. Flym has been leading the charge against Alito over his not having recused himself from a case involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, at a time when the New Jersey judge owned more than $390,000 in Vanguard funds.
Flym represented a Massachusetts woman who had reportedly discovered the connection in a court case trying to win back the assets of her late husband's individual retirement accounts.
Flym told The Boston Globe last year that Alito's ''lack of integrity is so flagrant" that he should be kept off the court.
