As Republicans crawl from the wreckage of the once-mighty GOP, it is important to identify exactly who helped drive the party into a ravine. At the federal level, spendthrift former president George W. Bush and equally irresponsible pork-barrelers like Rep. Don “Bridge to Nowhere” Young made a mockery of the party’s fiscal-conservative credo. At the state level, governors like New York’s George Pataki and California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger pandered to government-employee unions and opened the spending spigots, to taxpayers’ ongoing horror.
Other culprits include the state-level influence peddlers who seem more interested in cash than in free-market and conservative principles. New York’s former U.S. senator Alfonse D’Amato is a perfect example of this breed. “Senator Pothole” personally discovered an obscure state senator, George Pataki, from Peekskill, N.Y. After being muscled through the state GOP convention, Pataki scored the party’s nomination and won the governorship in 1994. After some limited first-term tax cutting, Pataki’s spend-o-rama began, swelling the state budget 79.5 percent — from $63.3 billion in 1994 to $113.6 billion in 2006. This was nearly double the inflation rate. D’Amato served as Pataki’s chief cheerleader and arguably has become New York’s most influential Republican — to the degree that party label still fits.
D’Amato most recently raised eyebrows while he stood shoulder to shoulder with prominent New York Democrats as Gov. David Paterson introduced Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand as the Empire State’s new U.S. senator. Gillibrand replaced Hillary Clinton after she departed for the State Department. New York Republicans thought D’Amato looked perfectly at home among the state’s top donkeys.
As Wayne Barrett reported in the January 27 Village Voice, D’Amato hosted a $1,000-per-plate fundraiser for Paterson last November 2. D’Amato’s ambidexterity also led him to host a benefit for GOP senator John McCain last March.
D’Amato’s New York- and Washington-based lobbying firm, Park Strategies, has served him well. He famously earned $500,000 for making just one phone call in 2004 to persuade former Metropolitan Transit Authority chairman E. Virgil Conway to help facilitate a $230 million loan to the company that owns the bus and subway agency’s headquarters building. D’Amato’s client in that transaction, Tamir Sapir, is a partner in a company called Bayrock/Sapir. It, in turn, donated $5,000 to Paterson last September.
“Once again, D’Amato has insinuated himself in the gubernatorial sweepstakes by supporting Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Rick Lazio,” observes Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute and veteran New York conservative activist. “How can you lose when you’ve got a horse in each party? In my judgment, D’Amato is the force that undermines Republican politics in this state, since he has become the kingmaker and powerbroker who stands in the way of genuine reform. As a consequence, we have a Democratic party constrained by its natural constituency and a Republican party paralyzed by its putative leadership.”
Down in Dixie, frustrated Republicans complain about another smooth operator. J. Warren Tompkins is a successful South Carolina lobbyist and campaign operative. Conservatives argue that his good fortune has come at the expense of their beliefs, and that he has enriched himself through insider’s deals and arrangements that subvert limited government.
Palmetto State governor Mark Sanford, a stalwart and increasingly vocal advocate for limited government and fiscal sanity, told Human Events’s John Gizzi that “the bottom line in South Carolina is we absolutely have Republican control, but we do not have a conservative working majority in our body politic. . . . A lot of folks with whom we’ve indeed had troubles have not been pushing conservative ideology.”
Sanford blames “RINOs” [Republicans in Name Only] such as Tompkins’s client, state senate Finance Committee chairman Hugh Leatherman. Sanford described him as “a guy who for 25 years of his life is a Democrat, he sees the time changing, he shifts to the Republican party, but it is indeed in name only.”
Sanford specifically points to Tompkins as a problem. Tompkins, Sanford said, “long ago earned his stripes as a Republican. But Warren Tompkins these days makes his money as a lobbyist with issues before the state general assembly.”
“I don’t think Mr. Tompkins is interested in responding to the governor’s assessment of his political acumen,” Terry Sullivan, a partner in Tompkins’s campaign consultancy, says by phone. “One of our big clients is Sen. Jim DeMint — another RINO, I guess. The governor has his opinion, and he has his opinion.”
School-choice activists consider Tompkins a hurdle to their goals of expanding learning options for parents and children. “Tompkins has been unfriendly to the idea of school choice — absolutely,” says one Palmetto State political insider who requested anonymity. “I don’t know if he personally is against it, or if it’s just the people who pay his bills. In any state GOP primary, the candidate for whom he consults typically is the anti-choice candidate. That would be a very fair statement to make.”
Tompkins’s critics cite his longtime support for such liberal Republicans as former state legislators Bill Cotty and Adam Taylor. “None of them have ever met a spending increase they didn’t like, and all are violently opposed to long overdue, market-based reforms to our state’s last-in-the-nation public school system,” a local online commentator wrote in 2006.
“In the 2006 primary, there were two GOP candidates for state superintendent of education,” explained one well-placed Republican source. “Tompkins’s candidate was Bob Staton. He was decidedly pro-establishment, anti-choice, and he ended up losing to an upstate South Carolina businesswoman named Karen Floyd. She ended up losing in the general election” to Democrat Jim Rex.
Tompkins spearheaded former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s South Carolina campaign. Tompkins took public heat during the GOP presidential primary when a new website began attacking former senator Fred Thompson (R., Tenn.). PhoneyFred.org slammed Thompson as “FancyFred,” “MoronFred,” and “PlayboyFred.” “Once a Pro-Choice Skirt Chaser, Now Standard Bearer of the Religious Right?” the website asked.
The Washington Post’s Michael Shear discovered in September 2007 that the website was registered to “Under the Power Lines.” Records listed its address as 807 Gervais Street, Suite 202, in Columbia, S.C. That is the exact location of Tompkins’s First Tuesday Strategies, then called TTS Consulting. UPL’s then-phone number and its official contact e-mail both flowed into Tompkins’s office.
The website vanished soon after the Post began asking about it.
Tompkins represented Competitive Insurance Group LLC, formerly the Thomas Brown Agency. Despite its name, CIG enjoyed a lucrative, no-bid government contract for covering state property against wind damage between 1988 and 2007. Governor Sanford and GOP state senator Murrell Smith fought to open the contract to bidding. They succeeded, saving taxpayers at least $2 million annually.
“Speaking personally, as a taxpayer, I was shocked to find that this large contract was being awarded annually without any sort of competitive process,” former Government Accountability Committee chairman Chad Walldorf told Charleston Business Journal’s Dan McCue.
Like D’Amato, Tompkins seems adroit at planting his feet on both sides of controversies and contests. He simultaneously led the 1998 reelection campaign of former GOP governor David Beasley, a video-poker opponent, while lobbying for the state’s video-poker industry, which opened its coffers to beat Beasley. Tompkins’s video-poker client won, as his political client lost the race with just 45 percent of the vote.
The Palmetto Scoop reported that First Tuesday Strategies was on retainer last year with the State Senate Republican Caucus, for which it provided direct mail, Internet design, and strategic service. Meanwhile, Tompkins’s lobbying firm maxed out with a $5,000 donation to the State Senate Democratic Caucus last June. This takes bipartisanship to the level of conflict of interest.
“I don’t know if Warren’s a fallen angel, in that he once believed in the conservative creed, but now the guy does not seem to have a philosophical bone in his body,” laments one leading South Carolina Republican. “He is driven by the almighty dollar. If it swings to the left, he goes to the left. If it swings to the right, he goes to the right. If it swings Democrat, he goes Democrat. That is not the mark of a conservative. And I don’t believe that is the mark of a Republican.”