"Casino Jack': Downfall of a lobbyist

The late George Hickenlooper's Casino Jack is a curious film, half exposé in the manner of Inside Job, but half roguish comedy. Its subject is Jack Abramoff, the über-lobbyist of the Bush years, whose spectacular fall seemed to mark the end of an era when K Street literally wrote the laws of the land.

At one point in the film, Abramoff (played with droll insouciance by Kevin Spacey) explains, for the fools who don't know it— they being John Q. Public— that legislators are too stupid to write laws themselves, and that without lobbyists to do it for them, the republic would grind to a halt. In this Tinkers-to-Evers-to Chance scenario, industry dictates its wishes to Congress, with the lobbyist serving as the middleman who translates special interests into the language of the national interest.

Spacey's Abramoff doesn't embroider the point, but the Congressmen depicted in the film are mostly so venal and doltish as to make it for him. Lawmaking requires expertise far beyond the capacity of public representatives, with their limited staffs and their hazy notions of the way great corporations and banking houses operate in a complex, multinational world.

Lobbyist as midwife

The lobbyist doesn't possess an appreciably better grasp himself, but he has access to those who do, and whose marching orders are direct and explicit. The lobbyist doesn't pretend to serve any interests but the ones that pay him, but the legislator of course must— and so the middleman is essential.

Nor is the lobbyist's job finished with the passage of the law, for it is then massaged by a federal bureaucracy whose accompanying rules and regulations translate it into specific operational terms. This is often the critical moment of the legislative process, for the Devil is in the details. This makes the lobbyist no mere middleman in the process, but the actual midwife— the only person present from first draft to final interpretation.

Patriotic business

Jack Abramoff saw his calling as an exalted one, and himself as a patriot. To him it was self-evident that the business of America was business, and that in serving it he served his country.

The Founding Fathers understood the republic they were creating as a field of contending interests, and the Constitution they framed as a highly schematic device for negotiating them. Actual politics would fill in the content. In our time, interests no longer compete between business and other social elements (labor, consumers, the general public) but only within business itself.

Like the lawyer, the lobbyist seeks clients, but what he sells is access. Abramoff's calling card was his Rolodex, the number of useful connections he could make between parties who could do business. He differed from others of his trade in not merely advertising himself but flaunting his connections, and himself in the process.

Jews, Christians and the Mob

As an Orthodox Jew who specialized in servicing the Christian Right, Abramoff was especially proud of his relationship with House Speaker Tom DeLay, now a federal inmate. He possessed not merely a gambler's instinct but penchant, and his own Mob-tainted interests in offshore casinos as well as his larcenous representation of Indian casinos proved his undoing.

Abramoff's go-between in these ventures is played by the ever-hammy Jon Lovitz, who is closer physically and temperamentally to the actual Abramoff; but, of course, it is Spacey who can act. There's a sidekick, too (a suitably sleazy turn by Barry Pepper), who betrays Abramoff in the end to save his own neck. Kelly Preston is the loyal wife who is surprised, surprised, surprised when her husband's world comes apart.

Jack Abramoff's story is as old as Fielding and Defoe: that of the clever lad who games the system and gets in over his head. A certain kind of go-getter always equates might with right, and never quite understands that the truly mighty have no use whatever for right.

Old Testament fantasy

When Abramoff is summoned before a Congressional committee for a ritual keelhauling by the very men he has faithfully served, his impulse is to rise up in righteous anger and, Old Testament-style, expose each and every one. But of course that's merely a fantasy, and Jack takes the Fifth.

As a morality tale, Casino Jack expresses less outrage than wistfulness for a more innocent time gone by. It was a time when the Enron scandal of 2001— fleetingly mentioned in the film—could still provoke surprise and anger, and company executives could face actual jail time.

When the true crisis of contemporary capitalism came with the crash of 2007, the banks didn't need a middleman: They had their very own, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs, who as Treasury Secretary bailed them out to the tune of $700 billion. No need for small-fry intermediaries like Abramoff and the tedious process of legislative sausage making. Paulson simply propped the banks up on the taxpayers' dime, making sure that his own firm came out on top. No one went to jail this time, and he retired a hero on the only street that counts—Wall, not K.

That movie hasn't been made yet, at least the fiction version. But I look forward to it.