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The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine
Doubleday
April 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 038551672X
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
What happens when ideologues obtain power? The K Street
Gang is the inside story of how a group of self-styled
Republican reformers succumbed to the temptations of power,
becoming even worse than the Democrats they had been elected
to replace. Now, some of those very reformers, including
Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, are under investigation, their
careers and reputations tarnished by the very system they
helped to create.
The story begins in 1994, when a
landslide victory led to the first GOP-controlled Congress
in forty years. The Republicans had it all: a visionary
leader in Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a program for
reform in the Contract With America, and a bonafide
electoral mandate. They pledged to shrink government,
reform politics, and drain the swamp of public malfeasance.
Ten years later the Republican party finds itself embroiled
in crippling scandals that have already brought about the
fall of House majority leader DeLay and may reach all the
way into the White House.
In The K Street
Gang, you'll meet DeLay, the brazen ideologue and
prodigious fundraiser who invited lobbyists to run amok in
exchange for campaign contributions; Jack Abramoff, the
conservative activist who left a troubled career in
Hollywood for a new beginning as a Washington lobbyist, only
to fleece his clients out of millions of dollars; Ralph
Reed, the former executive director of the Christian
Coalition whose principles took a backseat to his business
interests; Grover Norquist, the fiery antitax activist who
provided intellectual ammunition for the Republican takeover
of the lobbying industry, only to see the lobbyists take
over his party; and Adam Kidan, a down-on-his-luck
Republican businessman who engineered the scam of a
lifetime-one that had deadly consequences.
You'll
learn how Grover Norquist helped arranged meetings between
George W. Bush and men who are now alleged to be Islamic
terrorists; how a former lifeguard rose from beachbum to
aide to one of Washington's most powerful congressmen to
high-powered and extremely wealthy lobbyist, and how he lost
it all; and how a routine audit of an obscure Indian tribe's
finances has led to a widespread public corruption
investigation that threatens the political futures of half a
dozen congressmen and the political future of the Republican
Party.
In The K Street Gang, Matthew
Continetti takes us behind the headlines to meet a group of
young idealists who came to Washington to do good and ended
up staying to do well. It's about the perils of power and
the high cost of greed. Above all, it's about how the
American conservative movement began as a cause, turned into
a career and ended up as a racket.
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