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Even HUD Farce Can’t Get Democrats to Center Stage

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<i> John Ellis, who was a political analyst for NBC News, is now a vice president of Hill Holiday Public Strategists</i>

The Democratic Party should be having a field day with the mind-bending scandal of Secretary Samuel R. Pierce’s eight-year reign at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Republicans campaigned in 1980 on the theme of ridding Washington of waste, fraud and abuse. They are now in the tricky position of trying to clean up the department after the waste, fraud and abuse of the Reagan years.

All the elements are there for serious GOP-bashing. The “sleaze factor” that bedeviled the Reagan Administration is everywhere. The “greedy Republicans” caricature is an easy sell, with a nice snapshot of “country-club Republicans” such as Deborah Gore Dean, Pierce’s former executive assistant, who is seeking immunity from the House Government Operations Committee.

If politics were baseball, the HUD scandal should be batting practice for national Democratic politicians. A perfect way to limber up, work on timing and get the swing back before the 1990 midterm elections.

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What makes the HUD scandal a natural is that, in its particulars, many of the caricatures have the additional advantage of being true. Even by Washington standards, the cynicism at the core of these daily revelations is breathtaking. Reaganites, after all, marched into Washington on a feverish wave of anti-big-government sentiment. They promised free-market efficiencies and a safety net for those unable to compete. HUD, after an initial effort at “defunding,” was repositioned as part of the safety net.

Some net. Pierce stands accused by former aides of personally authorizing an $11-million project for old friends, as well as continuing dealings with a corporation after it had run up $500 million in losses. Other Pierce aides say he was detached from day-to-day work and delegated extraordinary powers to assistants. This portrait has Pierce, a soap-opera fan, grazing the channels of his remote-control TV, failing to notice that something close to the Teapot Dome scandal was taking place all around him.

Some of Washington’s best known Reaganites went at it the way crack addicts go at abandoned buildings. It may look ugly and be ugly but there are copper wiring and copper pipes and other salable fixtures--kind of a junkie cash machine. So too, did GOP political consultants, former Cabinet officials and various other limousine-lobby types, strip mine what was hidden behind HUD’s grim facade.

The only difference seems to be that stripping abandoned buildings in the war zones of New York and East St. Louis is hard work and illegal. Stripping HUD, on the other hand, involved a few quick midday phone calls to one or two senior officials, followed by five minutes or so of processing the bill to the client. Former Interior Secretary James G. Watt was paid $300,000 for eight phone calls and a lunch. GOP campaign advisers Black, Manafort and Stone were paid $324,000 for wiring up one deal in New Jersey. That any of this is even legally “gray” is a scandal unto itself.

No one in Washington--or anywhere else--has any illusions about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The name may be straight out of a social engineer’s handbook, but the game has always been politics. Congressmen, senators, governors and the people who “do” buildings while contributing large sums of money to political campaigns, have schemed and scurried to extract projects from HUD. Every state and congressional district needs a housing project. But there used to be a sense that fiduciary responsibility mattered and the process had some integrity. “Consultants,” for example, usually had some experience in the business of building housing.

Pierce’s regime changed all that. The buzzword became “Section 8 Republican.” This was someone with connections at HUD or in the Administration. For the usual hefty fee, this person could get you “fixed up” with a Section 8 Modified Rehabilitation Project that, after initial work, left you with a 15-year maintenance contract that was lucrative, to say the least.

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Given all these shenanigans, a reasonable person might suspect George Bush to be taking considerable heat for the failures of the Reagan-Bush Administration’s handling of HUD. A reasonable person might expect Bush to be in a “defensive mode” on the “HUD thing.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Bush’s HUD secretary has taken the lead in exposing the grisly reality of the scandal. Jack Kemp--whose principal political consultants to his 1988 presidential campaign stand accused of strip-mining HUD--has positioned himself as the avenging angel. With Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh vowing to prosecute all wrongdoers and Kemp slamming the door on programs most abused, the Bush Administration has managed to keep the scandal in the past tense.

Nifty footwork for a supposedly clumsy politician. Bush is enjoying astonishing public approval--positive poll ratings in the 70s. Given the President’s policy of building bipartisan consensus whenever possible, he may feel it impolite to mention a major factor in his current pre-eminence.

Which is: The Democratic Party has become irrelevant to the national political debate. Democrats are, for days at a time, out of the news cycle. Their major legislative initiative this year--a bill to raise the minimum wage--was immediately vetoed by the President, a veto easily upheld within days. That constitutes the biggest contribution of the nation’s oldest political party to the national debate of 1989. “Pathetic” is a word that leaps to mind. As a Democratic Party strategist admitted last week, “Sometimes, it’s like we aren’t even there.”

What are these Democrats doing? A vast scandal unfolds involving major GOP figures, a true story of greed and avarice run amok, and no Democrat of national stature says anything. Only Reps. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) are visible on the issue. Most Americans have no idea who they are. There are many reasons why Democrats are silent. Plenty of people, some of them Democrats, have pushed the rules to get HUD projects for their home districts.

Meanwhile, bookers for “Nightline” find themselves hard-pressed to find a national Democratic Party spokesperson. Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown is under siege--still trying to convince major party donors he is not Jesse Jackson’s stalking-horse. Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts is battling public disgrace at home. No senators or governors are “party leaders” in the sense that Sens. Hubert H. Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson were. Former House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. is gone. His successor, Jim Wright of Texas, resigned in disgrace. Rep. Tony Coelho has quit. Democratic hearts still flutter when Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York talks, but he is keeping his travel short and his attention local.

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Finally, Democratic control of Congress has become a psychological crutch. It allows the party to hold the illusion that somehow, someday, voters will “understand” and do the right thing --elect a Democratic President.

What Democratic Party leaders may one day realize is that the congressional crutch is killing them. Republicans, after all, were out of power from 1961 to 1969 and from 1977 to 1981; Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches. That has a tendency to focus the mind. The results of those two long journeys in the wilderness are apparent. The GOP has controlled the White House for 20 of the last 24 years and is likely to retain control after the 1992 elections.

The HUD story points out the sorry state of the Democratic operation. When a national political party is unable to “work” an issue as straightforward as the HUD scandal, it is not a matter of ideology so much as a matter of competence--to borrow a phrase. Bush has annihilated his Democratic opponents in the last six months. He boxed them in on the savings-and-loan crisis. He lured them into the tender trap of “ethics.” He has bewildered them with his attack-dog political apparatus at the various Republican national committees. He stole the environment issue from beneath their noses. He has preempted any foreign-policy discussions. And he nailed them on the flag.

If the Democrats want to win in 1992, they better stop denying reality and change behavior. They might start by sharing the nation’s outrage over the sleazy behavior of those involved in the HUD scandal. It’s a good issue.

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