BY DAVID RUBENSTEIN

The last week of October, with the indictment of Scooter Libby, the conclusion of the Harriet Miers fiasco, and the 2,000th U.S. death in Iraq, was arguably the worst week for the Republican party since Watergate. But it was a spectacular success for one Minnesota politician: our man inside-the-beltway, political operative and former six-term Republican Congressman, Vin Weber.
First, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes that Weber is just what the floundering Bush administration needs to steady itself. Three days later, Weber is in the New York Times again, on the front page, same subject, and quoted as an expert. (“You cleared the board of a couple big problems,” he says. “It gives us a chance to start rebuilding.”)

Back home, he’s on Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midday” with Gary Eichten, taking calls for most of an hour. Then it’s on to the Star Tribune op-ed page, for a “dialogue” with Annette Meeks, CEO of Minnesota’s Republican think tank, the Center of the American Experiment (Weber sits on the board). He rallies the troops. She promotes Weber’s old pal Newt Gingrich (fresh from a $2,500-a-plate dinner at the Center) for President.

The Star Tribune and MPR play Minnesota-nice and give Weber a pass. He’s billed as the former Congressman, an influential Republican with a long political history. MPR also notes his affiliation with the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. Neither mentions what he does for a living. Weber is managing partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Clark and Weinstock, “a consulting firm providing strategic advice to businesses interested in the policy-making process of the legislative and executive government branches,” as it’s described on the Humphrey Institute website, in other words, lobbying, often known as influence-peddling when it’s done by well-connected former office holders like Weber.
Among the better-known Clark and Weinstock clients is the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (“PhRMA”). If your elderly parents are losing sleep trying to decipher the new Bush administration drug plan, you can thank Vin Weber, among others. In 2001, when this turkey was being hatched, Weber got some unwelcome publicity when it was reported that he was talking to Bush’s senior advisor Karl Rove. He was trying—successfully as it turned out—to make sure the program would be totally privatized and there would be no “price controls.” In fact the law ended up being written so that the government was even precluded from negotiating discounts.

Weber's meeting with Rove made the news (Washington Post, July 21, 2001) only because it became known that Rove at the time owned almost a quarter million dollars worth of drug company stocks, a fact that apparently sank into the Washington cesspool and out of sight like a rock into a feedlot lagoon.
Weber’s connections have become legend. In addition to his six terms in the U.S. Congress from the Second Congressional District in southern Minnesota, he was Midwestern regional chair of Bush’s presidential campaign. Before that he was a prominent member of John McCain’s kitchen cabinet. (That has worked out well for Weber because much of his work takes the form of legislation that will pass through McCain’s powerful Senate Commerce Committee.)

One Clark and Weinstock client is CACI International, a private defense and intelligence-gathering firm. An official army investigation of Abu Ghraib prison was scathing in its treatment of CACI. The report's author, Major General Antonio M. Taguba, singled out two of the company's employees as having major responsibility for what transpired there. (CACI later denied that one of them worked for the company.)

Big companies and trade groups like PhRMA and CACI, and other Clark and Weinstock clients like Cargill, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, and the now defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm, have one thing in common. They operate within a maze of law and regulation that they must constantly shape and reshape to their liking. Firms like Weber's, working out of sight and under the muck, enable them to do it.

But you could say that CACI, with its Iraq-war connection, is more than just a business for Weber. Although he managed to stay out of the service during the Vietnam War, he has never had qualms about advocating that others take a bullet for the supposed salvation of the free world, including in Iraq. In 1998, Weber joined Donald Rumsfeld and such grizzled veteran chickenhawks as John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Cold War retread Elliott Abrams to sign an open letter to President Clinton. The letter (which can be found at http://www.newameri-
cancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm)tried to goad Clinton into a war with Iraq and suggested anything short of that would be “weakness.”

“American policy,” they wrote, “cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.”

Sometimes it seems that the fortunes of the Texas-based wing of the Republican party and the more refined McCain-Weber wing—now perhaps to include a resurrected Newt Gingrich, who counts Weber among his closest confidants—are like two ends of a teeter-totter. When one goes down, the other goes up. But it’s important to bear in mind the axle hardly moves. It just rotates. John Vincent Weber sounds so benign and reasonable, and looks so much like a cherub that’s about to blush, that sometimes it’s hard to remember who he is.

David Rubenstein is a Twin Cities writer.