Chapter 5: Cracks in the GOP

Scenes from  Uncle Bud’s Select Taproom

It’s amazing how quickly you can get somewhere when someone else is paying for it. And if that person runs a bar with a door in the basement that leads to tunnels that Tom Delay and the K Street Project used to speed people and money under the congested streets of the capitol, well let’s just say that Uncle Bud doesn’t have to worry about his Amex balance overwhelming him on the 25th of the month. I was in DC less than 10 hours after my Great-Uncle Bud, my Grandmother’s youngest brother, asked me to return to the city to help him divide up the GOP “resources.” The different factions of the party had splintered after the 2006 election debacle. Fingers were pointed and insider fighting began before the final vote counts were in. The empty GOP slot for the 2008 Presidential Elections drew the “Next Presidents of the United States” like cat hair to your best suit. The battle was engaged and Uncle Bud’s decades old status as a man who worked for whichever GOP faction carried the day was as close as the Republicans could find to an honest broker.
I wasn’t sure why he had asked me to help, but I wasn’t about to miss the chance to see how DC worked from the inside. Or, in this case, from underneath. I also hoped to track down my friend, Freedom Fyter, who I’d last seen storming angrily out of Uncle Bud’s bar carrying a black bag that he kept with him the entire time we were in DC.

As I stretched out in the unaccustomed luxury of first class, I tried to imagine what the resources were. Key staffers and fundraisers, donor lists, GOTV systems? I was, of course, completely wrong. Turns out that’s why Uncle Bud needed me. I hadn’t been around DC enough to be affected by it. And I didn’t know what it was that I hadn’t been affected by. I thought that I was politically savvy. I knew about the little men behind the curtain in Oz. But I didn’t know what was behind them.

Uncle Bud met me at Reagan National and on the way into the district we had a Metro car to ourselves. He seemed relieved to be able to talk freely. “The Party’s in shambles,” he said flatly. “I know that doesn’t worry you, but it does me. The worst thing that can happen is for the Democrats to control everything.”
“The worst for who?” I asked.
“For everybody,” he said grimly.
“You mean for all your friends.”
“No. Everybody.”
I knew that Uncle Bud had been a GOP insider since WWII. He still had nightmares about FDR. It wasn’t like him to be concerned about everybody. His line of work was a zero sum game, win or lose, all or nothing. To the victors, go the spoils. To the losers, goes what’s ever left over. And there’s rarely anything left over.

I’d never seen Uncle Bud so upset. He withdrew into his thoughts, his right hand absentmindedly flicking at a few stray cat hairs that clung to his pants.
“When did you get a cat?” I asked.
“A cat?” He looked surprised and then followed my glance to his pant leg. He brushed vigorously at the hairs and muttered, “ There must be dozens of them down there.”

We reached the station and went straight to the bar. Uncle Bud’s Select Taproom was one of those bars that was just there. It never drew the curious. It had that neighborhood bar appearance that gently, but firmly, projected a force field that no new customer had challenged in twenty years or so. There were a few windows located high on the wall and covered with a hazy umber film of grime bonded with cigarette smoke. There was neon signs for Pabst in one window and the “b” flickered weakly. You just knew that at any time of the day the dim interior contained three or four silent, old men in rumpled coats seated at the bar with at least one stool between each of them, and a boiler maker in front of them. They wouldn’t look up when you came in and the bar tender would have some glasses to wipe with a nearly clean towel before he got around to acknowledging you. The ash trays would be full, the pickled egg jars cloudy. So you kept walking. That was how Uncle Bud liked it.

Uncle Bud lead me through the door, past the four old men at the bar, nodding to the bartender who nodded in return, and up the back stairs to a small office/apartment on the second floor. “You’ll be staying at a little place in Virginia, but for a day or two, you’ll be fine here. Toss your things anywhere.” He motioned me to small enamel table in the center of the room. While he fixed dinner, he caught me up on events.
He’d been in the tunnels. He’d avoided them since the K Street Project began. He operated under a willful ignorance to avoid indictment policy that served him pretty well in the past. But he’d agreed to split up the resources, and that meant discovering what they were. Uncle Bud was disturbed by what he found.
It had been six years since he’d been in the tunnels. He’d helped some GOP friends take a shortcut to the Kid’s inauguration in 2001 so they could sneak up behind Karl Rove and slap a post-it with “Kick Me” on his broad back. (Karl was particularly sensitive to this as it bought back painful memories of Junior High and High School. Oh how they’d all suffer now!)
Six years ago, the tunnels were a haphazard network of brick lined old passageways originally designed as a sewage system. When a new system was dug, they were used to link basements of old Southeast DC businesses. Mostly they were forgotten. But during Prohibition, bootleggers had expanded and reinforced the tunnels to supply liquor to DC speakeasies and to Congressional offices. (The two where often interchangeable.) Old Man Kennedy had owned the bar for a while, and he’d been behind much of the underground expansion. A few storage rooms had been added and the tunnel system had been discretely extended.
But then came three great disasters that changed everything, 9/11, the Bush Administration, and Tom Delay. 9/11 lead to the Homeland Security Agency with its unlimited and unquestioned budget. The Bush administration brought to the White House an unstable mix of Neo-Cons, the Religious Right, and Karl Rove and W’s Mammon crowd, the Captains of Privatization and no-bid contracts, anti-government men and women determined to divert all the tax money that still flowed into DC into their pockets. The Hammer brought one Party rule to the House of Representatives and the K Street project, starring Jack Abramov, and soon torrents of money flowed through the tunnels were sewage once flowed. The sewage was cleaner. Fear was in the air, the Neo-cons were playing war games with real armies, the Religious Right had a True Believer in the Oval office, the Democrats were reeling, and greed was the order of the day. The country and the tunnels would never be the same.
Uncle Bud paused and looked away, unable or unwilling to continue. He seemed to slip away into his own thoughts. I knew that he’d been a GOP operative since his OSS days. He knew where the skeletons were hidden because he’d put quite of few them in discreet closets in far-flung corners of the world. I thought that he’d see the GOP domination of the Federal Government since 2000 as the great way to enjoy his hard earned retirement. But something was wrong. Uncle Bud shook his head and returned to the here and now. “You know, Jefferson was dead on correct,” he said softly. “ A revolution every generation. Of course, like so much else about the old reprobate, he got it right, but for the wrong reasons. 18th century rationalism always let him down. It’s all much stranger, much weirder, than he ever could have imagined.”
He rose and waved for me to stay seated. “I’ve got some things to do tonight,” he said, walking to the door. “You stay here and rest. I told your friend, Freedom Fyter, where to find you. He’ll be by later. Vic’ ll send up whatever you want from the bar, but don’t be stupid. We hit the tunnels at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow.” With that, Uncle Bud closed the door and left me alone in the small apartment over Uncle Bud’s Select Taproom, two floors above an entrance to the tunnels under DC.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007