"Thuggish"

My hometown paper made me proud today when it published the first installment of John Cheves' four-part profile of Mitch McConnell, the man whose motto is "money is speech," and whose Ahab-esque opposition to campaign finance reform has been his signature issue (if you can call that an issue...) As "Price tag politics" demostrates at length, McConnell's pet issue is simply "money and the power it buys."

The ever-so-creepy McConnell stands to become the Senate Majority Leader (if the Republicans hold the majority) come November.

Even before the initial installment was published today, the senior senator from Kentucky was going apeshit about the profile because the Herald-Leader accepted funding for the piece from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Deer Creek Foundation, an organization dedicated to such outrageous concepts as "the preservation and advancement of majority rule in our society, including the protection of basic rights as provided by the Constitution and Bill of Rights and education that relates to this concept." The new owner of the Herald-Leader is returning the funding but is standing firmly by the story. (Check the very thorough "complete coverage" section.)

Cheves' characterization of McConnell as a shakedown artist extraordinaire is based not on any partisan sniping, but on the grumblings of corporate donors on whom Mitch leaned too heavily.

Not every donor wants to pay forever. In 1999, a group of prominent corporate leaders -- including some of McConnell's donors -- led a rebellion against his fund-raising style. To his great anger, they endorsed reform.

One of them was Edward Kangas, who was worldwide chairman and chief executive of accounting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu from 1989 to 2000.

Kangas was no purist. In 1995, he and other Deloitte executives put together about $20,000 for McConnell. Kangas said Deloitte wanted "visibility" as it lobbied for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, making it harder for investors to recover fraud losses. The GOP Congress passed the act over President Clinton's veto.

Consumer advocates howled, but McConnell backed the act. Arthur Anderson & Co. -- the accounting firm later disgraced by its role in the Enron Corp. fraud -- encased a copy of the bill in plastic to keep as a trophy. It also gave McConnell $3,000 about the time of the Senate vote.

Sending money to politicians on occasion is standard business, Kangas said. But it began to feel as if whenever Congress met, lawmakers called to mention upcoming votes that could help or harm Deloitte, he said. And a donation request would follow.

"It was a shakedown," Kangas recalled, declining to say whether he specifically referred to McConnell.

"It's often a regulated industry, like the banks, the financial services companies, the pharmaceuticals," he said. "An executive gets a call from a politician -- or someone close to the politician, who everyone knows speaks for him -- who says, 'Hey, it would be really appreciated if you could show us some support right now.'"

So Kangas joined other corporate leaders at the Committee for Economic Development -- a Washington-based business group -- in endorsing the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill.

McConnell was outraged. He mailed angry protest letters to CED members and their companies to warn that their reform advocacy would crimp the income of the Republican Party.

"I would think that public withdrawal from this organization would be a reasonable response," he wrote. At the bottom, he scrawled personal messages naming individuals and concluding: "I hope (name) will resign from CED. Mitch."

"Mitch was not completely happy," Kangas said, chuckling.

"It was thuggish," said Charles E.M. Kolb, the CED's president.

Kolb, a White House adviser to the first President Bush and an appointee under President Reagan, previously had donated to McConnell, but he resented McConnell's tone. His group stood firm.

"His letters sounded like a heavy-handed threat -- 'Continue to do business with these guys, and you won't do business with us' -- but it backfired," Kolb said. "It became a strong piece of evidence as to what's wrong with the system. It was Exhibit A."

Read the whole article....

McConnell by the numbers.

And don't miss this article from American Scientist, "The Dirt on Coal." McConnell is a big recipient of donations from the mining industry... and the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration reports to McConnell's wife, anti-labor Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. Not that that's any big deal....