Corruption and the College Republicans

From Rolling Stone:

So Jack Abramoff is now a confessed criminal, a corrupter of congress, a man who's decision to turn state's witness now threatens the careers of as many as 60 senators and representatives. All of which begs the question: How did Jack Abramoff become Jack Abramoff?
The answer, as the Weekly Standard reports is the College Republicans.

"Jack Abramoff is 45. He grew up in Beverly Hills, son of a Diners Club executive, and went to college at Brandeis. A shared passion for conservative activism -- not the most common passion on campuses in Massachusetts -- led him to a friendship with [Grover] Norquist, a Harvard graduate student. Together they organized students for the 1980 Reagan campaign in their state, which Reagan, miraculously, carried. After graduation they launched a campaign to take over a sleepy, Washington-based subsidiary of the Republican National Committee called College Republicans. Abramoff spent $10,000 of personal money winning the chairmanship. With Norquist as executive director, he transformed CR into a 'right-wing version of a communist cell -- complete with purges of in-house dissenters and covert missions to destroy the enemy left,' as Nina Easton puts it in her useful history, Gang of Five .... They were soon joined by [Ralph] Reed, freshly graduated from the University of Georgia and looking even younger then than he does now, if you can imagine."

Norquist is of course the anti-tax zealot who famously declared he wanted to reduce the size of government so he could strangle it and drown it in a bathtub. Reed is the former head of the Christian Coalition and to this day perhaps the most famous face of the evangelical right. They're all joined in their College Republican heritage by one Karl Rove, who was executive director in the early 70's.

All I'm saying is that if the Republican Party's culture of corruption has a breeding grounds, you'll find it right here.

The Weekly Standard article is extremely interesting (I never thought I'd ever find myself quoting The Weekly Standard... yikes!) It continues,

Easton's sensibility may seem a bit delicate, but she well captures the revolutionary mood among the young idealists who came to Washington after Reagan's inauguration in 1981, among whom Abramoff and Norquist were the loudest and most energetic. They were soon joined by Reed, freshly graduated from the University of Georgia and looking even younger then than he does now, if you can imagine. Borrowing tactics from their leftist counterparts, College Republicans were particularly good at dramatizing the causes of limited government and anti-communism. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland, they swarmed the Polish embassy in Washington and burned the Soviet flag for news cameras. They staged counter-demonstrations to those put on by the useful idiots of the nuclear-freeze movement. At late-night gatherings they sang age-old anarchist anthems that Norquist had taught them. You could tell a College Republican by the buttons he wore: "There's no government like no government," for example.

After College Republicans, Abramoff brought the same theatricality to his other activist jobs. "His greatest strength was his audacity," says the writer and political consultant Jeff Bell, who worked with Abramoff and Norquist at a Reaganite group called Citizens for America in the mid-1980s. "He and Grover were just wildmen. They always were willing to throw the long ball. Jack's specialty was the spectacular--huge, larger-than-life, almost Hollywood-like events." As the group's chairman, Abramoff staged his greatest spectacular in 1985, a "summit meeting" of freedom-fighters from around the world, held in a remote corner of the African bush. Among the summiteers was Adolfo Calero, a leader of the Nicaraguan contras, and playing host was a favorite of the 1980s conservative movement, the Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, who fought bravely against the Cuban occupiers of his country but turned out, alas, to be a Maoist cannibal. In her book Easton reports that both Abramoff and Norquist, who had been hired as Abramoff's assistant, were later dismissed from CFA for "lavish spending."

Read the rest.