The Missing Abramoff-to-Dems Cash

One point to add to Brad DeLong’s, and others’, dogged and appropriate insistence that the Washington Post finally correct its own and its ombuds-person’s errors regarding possible Democratic beneficiaries of Abramoff-tainted cash: To defend her modified, limited clarification that Abramoff "directed" money to Democrats from his clients, the Post’s Deborah Howell cited this graphic, which features a fragment of a list that Abramoff sent the Louisiana Coushatta tribe suggesting congressional incumbents and candidates and party organizations they should contribute to.

Brad has noted that the fragment, which contains mostly names beginning with the letter C (the full document is not publicly available) proposed $4,000 in contributions to Democrats, against $115,000 to Republicans. But a look at actual donations from the Coushatta raises even more questions

The Howell fragment indicates that Abramoff asked the Coushatta to give $2,000 each to two Democrats, then-Senators Jean Carnahan and Max Cleland, as well as an amount, illegible on the graphic, to Tom Daschle, at the time still Senate Majority Leader.

The full list of contributions from Abramoff and his clients is available from the Center for Responsive Politics here. This list makes no attempt to determine wehter the contributions were "directed" by Abramoff or reflected longstanding loyalties to legislators who, like Daschle or Byron Dorgan, "have been supporting the tribes for longer than Jack Abramoff has been bilking them."

Comparing this list to the Howell fragment, one finds that neither the Coushatta nor any other Abramoff client actually gave money to Jean Carnahan, although Abramoff himself and his clients gave $3,000 to her Republican opponent, Jim Talent. The Coushatta did give to Cleland, not $2,000 but $500, while Abramoff and his tribal clients gave eleven times as much to Cleland"s opponent, now-Senator Saxby Chambliss. Daschle, based on the CRP list, got nothing from the Coushatta, although other tribes did support him, while Abramoff himself and other clients backed his opponent, Sen. John Thune.

In short, rather than $4000 to Democrats, the Howell fragment together with contribution data shows only $500 in contributions directed and actually given, and even that one, given the $5,500 to Chambliss"s shameful campaign, is kind of like pulling a guy up off the mat so you can give him another punch in the gut.

It"s possible that the Center for Responsive Politics analysis didn"t capture everything, if, for example, a Coushatta contribution was made in the name of an individual who did not list the tribe as an employer. (There are no other contributions from the tribe"s zip code.) It"s also possible that the tribes received Abramoff"s recommendations and ignored them, which could be a defense by Abramoff. Or, it may be that the Howell fragment wasn"t Abramoff"s final recommendation to the Coushatta.

But the bottom line is that this fragment of a list is no evidence of actual contributions to Democrats made at Abramoff"s direction.

Another point occurred to me as I was overindulging in this data: the period of Abramoff"s peak influence was fairly brief, centered around the 2002 election. That year he, his tribal clients and SunCruz Casinos gave more than $2 million to candidates and committees (on a par with what General Electric or Wal-Mart, together with all their employees, gave in that cycle), up from $600,000 the cycle before and then it dropped again to $1.4 million last year.

And in retrospect, 2002 was really the killer election for Democrats, arguably more than 2000 or 2004. It established absolute one-party control over all of government, and set the model for the shameless Rovian abuse of national security as a weapon, particularly in the Cleland-Chambliss race, which in turn left the Democrats utterly paralyzed in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and even today accounts for the anxious, paralytic response to Rove"s announcement that the party will pursue the same strategy again.

Democrats bear plenty of responsibility for their 2002 defeat, particularly for neglecting to articulate an economic strategy in the middle of a recession. But it"s striking to realize what a large role Abramoff played in targetting money to Republicans in tight races that year.