Who Is More Righteous--Stone-Throwers or Their Targets?

As Ed Rollins demonstrates all too thoroughly in his just published book, “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms,” American politics has no equivalent of the attorney/client privilege.

The veteran Republican hired gun pulls off a very neat maneuver here. First he gets paid enormous amounts of money by questionable but extraordinarily well-heeled politicians. Then he gets paid an enormous amount of money to trash these candidates (and one candidate’s wife) and feed his celebrity as he embarks on a career of corporate consulting.

Nice work if you can get it. And stomach it.

There are good and bad reasons why there is no political equivalent of the attorney/client privilege.

The bad reason is that the business of consulting and advising is a free-wheeling pirate culture.

The good reason is that politics is the public’s business. There are too many malignancies in the body politic sustained by the code of omerta--conspiracies, in essence--to insist that advisors, consultants and staffers pledge undying confidentiality. That way lie the Nuremberg trials.

The pro-Rollins spin, of course, is that he is performing a public service with his allegations, that he is revealing important insights into the process and in particular, that he is telling us things about Michael and Arianna Huffington and Ross Perot that we need to know. But is that really what he’s doing? (A point of personal disclosure: I once appeared on Arianna Huffington’s TV show and we have mutual friends.)

We already know that Ross Perot is eccentric (which, since he has something to say, wouldn’t necessarily stop me from voting for him). We also know that Michael Huffington is an empty suit who tried to buy a seat in the Senate and that Arianna Huffington is a ruthlessly relentless, if rather charming, social climber. (So much for future invitations.)

So what Rollins is really dishing up is, well, a lot of nasty dish. Which, unfortunately, is what too often passes for news in our Trivial Pursuits media culture. And with Rollins, we don’t even know if the dish is true.

This, after all, is a man who made and later recanted the sensational--and, not coincidentally, self-aggrandizing--statement that the 1993 campaign of his client, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, gave massive bribes to African American ministers in order to “suppress” the Democratic vote. It was bull, but it made Rollins look like a big man when he said it.

That would-be master of the universe attitude is one of the most pernicious things about political consulting. Guys like Rollins--and they are almost always guys--think that they and not the political figures they work with should be the real story.

I don’t mean to pick on Michael Huffington, but it was perfectly obvious that he was utterly unqualified to be a U.S. senator long before he exhibited the boneheaded hypocrisy of bashing illegal immigrants even as he had an illegal immigrant nanny caring for his children.

Here is where we see the quintessential cynicism of a Rollins. He could have told Huffington that he was a nice man who should save his $30 million and get more seasoning before tackling the big issues. Instead, Rollins grabbed for the cash, supposing that he and his colleagues could use all that Huffington oil money to create a senator out of whole cloth. So debased has our politics become that it very nearly worked.

Now Rollins is telling us that these nasty--though, oddly enough, always well-heeled--people he somehow found himself working for are really bad. While it’s nice of him to share these belated discoveries with us, it’s also a little disingenuous.

Actually, it’s just positioning for the next phase of his career, as he wafts on a wave of celebrity from working for mostly corporate-dominated politicians to working for the corporations themselves. We should all look forward to Rollins’ next book, in which he will undoubtedly share his belated discovery that some corporations buy politicians and manipulate governments. And that profound cynicism is one of the few constants in this accelerative age.

William Bradley, a Democratic political advisor, has worked with Gary Hart, Kathleen Brown, Jerry Brown and Tom Hayden. He can be reached at <bill@brad.com>, but knows no gossip.