So far, my favorite part of the Jack Abramoff story is the fact that he went over the spending limit for his middle-school class president's race, and that he did so by throwing a party for prospective voters. I mean, a party? I can see it, can't you? A whole bunch of folks, chowing down on hot dogs and gulping Mountain Dew at Jack's personal picnic table while a Pop Warner game raged on the nearby field. Loading up the whole gang into the family minivan and having Mom drive them all down to the town's best mini-golf layout, where Jack paid for everyone's round, and even arranged to have someone's ball go into the clown's nose so as to get that person a free round.
Didn't Tom Perrotta write a novel about this? Classic.
(My second-favorite part is the fact that Jack apparently was a high-school champion at all of those weightlifting categories -- lift-and-squat, clean-and-jerk -- that sound like the itinerary for Neil Bush's next trip to Thailand. Happily, it's likely that Jack soon will be residing in a place where a great number of people lift weights.)
However, I do have to confess a certain sadness about the whole affair. Well, not sadness so much as a sort of rueful jealousy. This comes from having been brought up on the political traditions of the Commonwealth (God save it!) of Massachusetts, in which there is only one serious question when it comes to things like Jack Abramoff and his amazing political laundromat. It is a question that echoes from the county commissions to the governor's counsel to the halls of the Great and General Court itself. It is a question that leaps unbidden to the lips of every child, and one that is often the last one off the lips of every aging solon as he passes on to the great fund-raiser in the sky -- which is not to be confused with his own wake, which likely also will be a fund-raiser, but not one at which he is supposed to be anything more than set decoration.
To wit:
Hey, where the hell's mine?
I'm serious here. I seem to be the only person tangentially involved in American politics who never got his hands on money that had at some point passed through Jack Abramoff's enterprises. I'm fairly sure that every individual piece of currency -- every bill, every coin -- produced by the U.S. Mint since 1953 was at one time or another in the possession of Abramoff, his aides, his kennel of lobbyists, his stable full of dancing legislators, or one of the several Native American tribes who employed him to treat their money the same way the U.S. Cavalry once treated their land.
Reach deep down into your pockets and take out that dollar bill that went through the washer with your pants. Go dig a penny out of the far reaches of your desk drawer. Have them both dusted for prints.
Jack's are on them, aren't they?
So where the hell's mine?
I have never felt so out of it, so beyond the Beltway, as I do today.
I read that Chris Matthews and Brit Hume were the celebrities -- Gawd, Washington, where are your standards? -- at a fund-raiser for one of Jack's phony charities that later got looted. Aides, sniveling little clerks fresh from the fetus farms of the Heritage Foundation, they get the seats in the luxury box at the MCI Center. (Question for federal prosecutors who may be reading this: does taking a ticket to watch the Wizards play the Hawks really constitute a bribe? I mean, honestly, now.) Some perky little homunculus from the office of Representative Billy Bob Dustheap (R-Dead Zone) gets a nice thick steak at Jack's restaurant, and I'm eating at a dog wagon outside Union Station? Where did I go so damn wrong?
I can't even draw a bribe from a guy who apparently handed money over to everyone in Washington including the statue of James Garfield at the Congressional end of the Mall. Near as I can tell, you couldn't swing a dead cat in Washington without fungoing one of Jack's envelopes across the reflecting pool. There were church groups, riding the buses back to Iowa, only to discover that, somehow, there was $50,000 stored in each wheel well. You could have stood him up next to the Farecard machines at the Metro Center underground and he would have given you two C-notes for the trip to Anacostia.
But me?
Not a nickel.
I could have done it. I could have preached the family values and then gone on the junkets to Scotland. I could've written hilarious e-mails about the dumb Indians and all that money. I could've profited from sin as well as anyone else could -- especially Ralph Reed, who's got no more chance of a political career now than do any of his fellow amphibians. I could be Ralph Reed. I could have been somebody. I could have been a contender. I could have had class. I could be lying five on the Road Hole at St. Andrews. I could be answering an indictment right now.
I am never going to be cool.
Not ever.
Heartbreaking, is what it is.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
