Chapter 100: The Race Begins

One thing I did with Brewster was to start spending some money. In the military, they taught you very early on the value of reconnaissance. In business, it was no different. If you were going to win, or just even hold your own, you needed to know who you were going up against, and what they had planned. In the Army, you could add espionage to the mix. That was a bit frowned on in the business world, at least if you got caught, so we generally avoided that, but I knew of companies that did it.

Why should politics be any different? Andy Stewart was not going to conduct a gentlemanly campaign, not against Bill Worley, who had already announced a primary battle, and certainly not in the general election against me. The more information we had on him, the better. The first thing that McRiley and the accountant and I agreed on was the need to have Stewart investigated.

One aspect was to look for ‘gotcha’ moments, where he had said one thing and voted for something different. Why would a dedicated public servant do such a thing? Not to seem cynical about it, but perhaps he had been paid to change his mind. That led to a second subject for investigation, Stewart’s campaign finances. Who was donating money to Stewart, and what were they getting in return?

The sort of thing we needed was his financials, as well as some very discreet inquiries into everything else. Specifically, how had a guy who had never once worked in the private sector, but had always worked for the government, somehow, become a multimillionaire? Inquiring minds wanted to know! We needed to hire a forensic accounting team, and perhaps not look too closely at the techniques they used to get some of the information we asked for.

Who was to do all these wonderful things? A quick answer was to hire a clipping service, to go through newspapers and magazines and find anything being reported on Stewart. John suggested we expand the search to what they were reporting on me, since Andy was certainly going to do that. We needed professionals to do the investigating of the finances, but for a lot of the other work we needed volunteers. There was no way I could afford paid personnel to do all the scut work; that would blow through our campaign budget way too fast. I needed campaign volunteers, and fast. One of our first priorities after officially announcing my candidacy was to start rallying the troops. McRiley laid out a timetable and a plan for doing this. We would start out with captive audiences, the local Republican groups. One problem we had was that there were only a couple of colleges in the district, Carroll Community College and Western Maryland College in Westminster. College kids made for great volunteers, but on the downside, they were usually Democrats. Win some, lose some. I would certainly rely on whatever resources the local Republican committees had available.

Campaign finance was one area where I had the advantage. The estimate we had out of the RNC was that it would cost approximately $350,000 to run for Congress this year, but that was a national average. I knew that number would skyrocket; I remembered reading (back on my first go) that by 2010 the cost would be three times that, and by 2020, it would double yet again. Senate runs could cost five or six times as much, easily. For a typical Congressman, every moment of their day was spent trying to come up with cash for their next campaign. That was their job, and if they could work on laws or fix the country in the meantime, that was nice, too. They had to come up with at least $500 in campaign funds every day for two years to even have a chance. If you had a primary battle, or a rich competitor, you could double or triple those numbers.

The need to pay for a home and schools in the D.C. area only made it worse. Various ethics rules allowed for some speeches to be considered not as fund raisers, but as personal educational discussions, which could be considered income. Income that could go towards paying their local mortgage. Income from book sales was also income and not allocated to the campaign. There was never enough money to go around.

So, how to come up with that cash? Congressmen constantly held fundraisers, dinners, and speeches where they would pass the hat and collect money. A $100 a plate dinner, with 50 paying guests, collected $5,000, with maybe only half of that going into the coffers. That covered five days’ worth, but there were only so many dinners and speeches you could give. Also, there was a limit to how much you could charge. Presidents got $10,000 and above; Congressman wannabes got maybe $50. You constantly begged for money.

Enter the lobbyist. He’d be happy to funnel some cash to your campaign, because he knew you’d be happy to give the group he represented an adequate hearing and consideration on their concerns. The quid pro quo was obvious - vote their way or there was no more cash. There were thousands of lobbying groups in Washington. Some of them competed against each other and some duplicated each other. The money came from various corporations. Even Big Bob and Lefleur Homes hired lobbyists. They paid a small amount on every home they sold to the New York Manufactured Housing Association in Albany, which funneled some of their proceeds to the Manufactured Housing Institute in Washington, and there were at least another half-dozen housing related lobbying groups I knew of, not including the ones for construction and real estate.