Vin Weber dazzled after 6 months in the Beltway: "This was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime." Weber puzzled by Tea Party freshmen who said they're only doing the job for the country-NY Times, Oct. 2011

NY Times interviews some "Republican" lobbyists including Vin Weber for an Oct. 2011 article: Weber: "“I can just tell you, when I came to Congress, we were rabble-rousers, but, boy, if you'd asked any of us six months into it how we were enjoying it, we’d have said this was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Weber said."

10/16/2011, "Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?" NY Times Magazine, Matt Bai

"Vin Weber was 28 when he was elected to Congress [1983-1993, the entire time in which the GOP was in the minority] in the Reagan wave of 1980, and he soon became one of Newt Gingrich’s chief allies--part of a group of rebellious young conservatives who rose up against their affable minority leader, Bob Michel. Weber left Congress before the 1994 Republican takeover [which became the first time in 40 years that Republicans controlled the House. From 1955-1980, Democrats controlled both House and Senate], forced out by [his actions in] the House banking scandal, but soon reinvented himself as one of the more powerful lobbyists in town.... 

Like nearly every other establishment Republican I visited, Weber went out of his way to tell me how much he admired these Tea Party lawmakers [from the Nov. 2010 grassroots landslide] and shared in their essential cause. “One thing I do notice about them,” he added, “is that when I ask them, ‘So how are you enjoying it?’ almost none of them will say, ‘Oh, jeez, I’m really loving this.’ They all say some version of, ‘This is not what I’d want to be doing, but I’ve got to do it for the country.’” Weber seemed genuinely surprised that this aversion to Washington didn’t melt away once they arrived in town.

 “I can just tell you, when I came to Congress, we were rabble-rousers, but, boy, if you’d asked any of us six months into it how we were enjoying it, we’d have said this was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Weber said. “It just struck me. And it’s part and parcel of this anti-government mind-set.”

 I wondered if maybe the Tea Partiers’ contempt for Washington was just a kind of outsider’s shtick. 

“I’d feel better about it if I thought it was,” Weber said glumly....

Sitting across from Weber, I found it possible to understand why most establishment Republicans are optimistic that they can ultimately co-opt the House freshmen, prevailing on them to accept the wisdom of compromise. After all, here he was, the aging insurgent, now managing partner at the lobbying firm of Clark and Weinstock. A lot of the stridently ideological Republicans who came to town in the Reagan and Gingrich years quickly flamed out and were never heard from again, but Washington has more than its share of Vin Webers and Grover Norquists and Karl Roves — Republican politicians and activists who arrived crusading against the city’s corrupt culture and subsequently became fixtures in its boardrooms and restaurants.

“They'll become the establishment, ” Charlie Black, the longtime Republican strategist and lobbyist, confidently predicted when we talked about the more radical members of the freshmen class. Still, absorption into the establishment, even if possible, takes time to unfold, and Washington Republicans are focused only on the year ahead, preferring to see this disorderly period as little more than an interlude....

Soon enough, however, all heads will swivel to Iowa and New Hampshire, where a Republican nominee will emerge at last to put his or her stamp on the party’s image. And this is where, the establishment presumes, the long season of Tea Party zaniness will finally recede into the background, subsumed into some more enlightened, and more practical approach....

While some strange things can happen when the Republican faithful get restless in the off years, the presidential process is the means by which the party establishment has traditionally reasserted control.... 

Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party back toward the broad center next fall, effectively disarming the Tea Party mutiny. If that’s the case, then it now seems like only a matter of time before the Republican empire, overwhelmed by insurrection for much of the last two years, strikes back at last.

“I think it’s waning now,” Scott Reed, a veteran strategist and lobbyist, told me when we talked about the Tea Party’s influence last month. Efforts to gin up primaries next year against two sitting senators — Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Indiana’s Dick Lugar — have been slow to gain momentum, Reed said. [Indiana's Dick Lugar, age 80, was in fact defeated in the May 2012 primary]....

Party leaders have managed to bleed some of the anti-establishment intensity out of the movement, Reed said, by slyly embracing Tea Party sympathizers in Congress, rather than treating them as “those people.”

Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers?

“Trying to,” Reed said. "And that's the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of the people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.”...(p. 1)

“The thing I get a kick out of is these Tea Party folks calling me a RINO,” John Feehery, a lobbyist who was once a senior House aide, recently told me. “No, guys, I’ve been a Republican all along. You go off into your own little world and then come back and say it’s your party. This ain't your party.”... 

It’s worth pointing out that when Republicans express concern about the anti-government militancy in their midst, it has a ring of serious denial. After all, generations of Republican candidates have now echoed the theme of Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” And a progression of ideological uprisings inside the party — the Reagan revolutionaries, Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades, Newt Gingrich’s band of guerrilla lawmakers and now the Tea Partiers--have only pushed the anti-Washington argument closer to its illogical extreme....

Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicare prescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government that has come to define the modern conservative campaign."...

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Added:

Vin Weber attended Bilderberg in 2008.

 


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