Grilling Weber

In Vin Veritas

By Kevin Featherly

It's classic Vin Weber. He has just moderated an Oct. 22 Humphrey Institute forum featuring a speech by Colorado's ex-governor, Richard Lamm, an indictment of American health care. Lamm pitches a two-pronged solution -- tough-love health care rationing paired with universal medical coverage. Weber, the rock-ribbed conservative who once was Newt Gingrich's chief enforcer, naturally thinks universal health care is for the birds. A reporter approaches Weber -- a tall, sturdy man, imposing in suit and tie -- asking him to size up the talk. As Weber prepares to answer, he leans slightly forward, his clear blue eyes set on hard focus. He cuts loose with a display -- of his famed civility. "First," he says, "let me tell you where I agree with him."

A disarming moment. Politicos more often tussle, scrap, insinuate, if they don't veer directly to insult. Let me tell you where I agree with him? But one quickly learns that to hang with Weber -- arguably Minnesota's most influential and powerful national political figure -- is to experience many disarming moments.

Query acquaintances -- excusing Al Franken -- and a consensus of contradictions emerges. Weber is brilliant, but intriguingly humble. He is funny, charming, a storyteller -- but a serious policy wonk. He is a lifelong, loyal conservative, but battled the Reagan administration over nuclear power and apartheid. He's a classic K Street superlobbyist who enjoys the trust of skeptical Beltway journalists. He's an anachronism in post-coalition America -- a power figure engaged in civil discourse, leaving opponents feeling respected, understood.

Weber suggests it's all rooted in humility:"I think it's mainly just the fact that I've never thought that I was smarter than everybody else," Weber says. "So I thought that I should just listen to them, maybe."

The paradoxes are difficult to parse. Some say they are explained by sheer intellectual heft. "I hate to use the word intellectual, because that suggests the ivory tower," says Tim Penny, Weber's former congressional colleague and co-chair at the Humphrey Institute's Policy Forum. "He's engaged in ideas, he is not threatened by countervailing ideas. ... I call him a thoughtful conservative, and that label doesn't apply to a lot of the conservatives I know."

Others describe his mastery of interpersonal relations. Weber's friendship with Gov. Tim Pawlenty is a case in point. Weber supported ultraconservative millionaire Brian Sullivan in a bitter fight over the 2002 GOP gubernatorial nomination. History is strewn with political alliances demolished over far less. But Pawlenty seems forgiving. "While he has strongly held beliefs," the governor says, "he advocates for them and presents them in a way that is viewed as thoughtful, respectful, civil -- and that allows him to have a disagreement without ticking [people] off or burning through relationships."

Still, there is some mystery to the story. How does a newspaper brat from tiny Slayton, Minn., earn a permanent pass to the penthouses of American power? The centrist Washington Times columnist Barry Casselman offers a suggestion:"He's been right. That's why he has the influence he has. After a while people say, 'Hey, we need this guy.'"

Born Conservative

John Vincent ("Vin") Weber was born in southwestern Minnesota on July 24, 1952, possessing a political pedigree. His grandfather and namesake was a Republican state senator who was once considered a likely GOP gubernatorial prospect -- until a young Harold Stassen emerged. He passed on both his Republican politics and a publishing business to his own son, John D. Weber, the younger Vin Weber's father.

Weber calls his dad "a questionable guy," an alcoholic who died young. Like Weber's grandfather, John D. Weber also was publisher of the Murray County Herald newspaper. He was a talented political observer whose editorials often were sampled in the Minneapolis papers. But he wasn't terribly good at managing the business, which the family eventually lost. He tried to follow his father's footsteps to public office by running for the legislature, but lost, accepting instead a county Republican chairmanship. But Weber credits his dad with one significant contribution -- fostering his own appetite for the stacked-up newspapers and magazines to which the family subscribed.

By Election Day 1964, at age 12, he had memorized "The Conscience of a Conservative" and "Why Not Victory?" by presidential candidate Barry Goldwater; "Choice, Not an Echo," by Phyllis Schlafly; and several other conservative tomes. "I had boxes full of newspaper clippings at the end of the [presidential] campaign, editorials, editorial cartoons and news stories," Weber recalls. "I never realized until later that I was reading things that almost nobody at that age read."

After graduating from Slayton High School in 1970, he attended the University of Minnesota. He was active in the College Republicans, and in the summers worked for the family newspaper. Tom West, now president of the Minnesota Newspaper Association, was a GOP campaign worker in those days, and recalls the young Weber. "I think Vin always had larger aspirations to go on to other things," he says. "He was one of those guys that was totally immersed in [politics]. He loved it and wanted to be involved."

By 1974, Weber helped steer Tom Hagedorn's successful congressional campaign, success that attracted the attention of GOP national committee operative Rudy Boschwitz. "I thought that Hagedorn wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, as my grandfather said," Boschwitz recalls. "And when he won I said, 'Goddamn! Somebody must have been directing him who is awfully smart.'" Before long, Boschwitz had a sit-down with Weber, examining Boschwitz's electoral prospects. He later named Weber his campaign manager.

That was in 1978, two years after Weber lost his only election as a candidate, a 1976 state legislature bid. Shortly after, he abandoned an attempt at co-publishing the Herald. After guiding Boschwitz into the U.S. Senate in '78, Weber set his own sights on Congress. In 1980, the 28-year-old competed to represent Minnesota's 6th District (later redrawn as the 2nd), and won.

Two years later, on the day his freshman term ended, Weber encountered a fiery young Georgia congressman whom everyone called "Newt." Arguably, their chat changed the course of U.S. politics.

Opportunity Society

"What are you doing for the next 10 years?" Newt Gingrich's question struck Vin Weber as odd. The Minnesotan expected to remain in Congress, but hadn't given the future much thought. Gingrich, however, was very much interested in Weber's future, and his own, and the Republicans'. Weary of the GOP leadership's defeatist "opposition-party" mentality, Gingrich saw in Weber a kindred visionary spirit that could help him make the Republicans the majority party.

"What drew me to Weber," Gingrich said recently, "was that he was clearly the best younger politician in the House when he got there. He was a guy I needed. He had much more talent than I did in working inside an administrative body -- much more talent."

Together, with several others, they surfaced as the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Like traditional Republicans, they were devoted to tax-cutting and military might. But they introduced something new -- a genuine social policy that pushed post-welfare-state answers to traditional Democratic issues of poverty, the environment and race.

Gingrich's combative tactics often obscured that vision, and it was Weber who often made it palatable to the press, recalls Washington Post columnist David Broder. "Gingrich being Gingrich, he was sometimes brilliant and sometimes indecipherable," Broder says. "Weber was the person who could sort of take the concept and move it into a real-world context where you could understand what the hell he was saying. It was in this period that some of us [in the Washington press corps] began to rely on him." Today, Weber remains a key source to Broder and many other Beltway reporters.

By 1989, Gingrich was gaining traction, fomenting the revolt that would culminate in the GOP congressional takeover of 1994. "It's very hard not to think of Vin as one of the two or three people who played decisive roles in creating the modern Republican majority in the House," Gingrich now says. Ironically, however, Weber wouldn't be around to see the fruit of those labors, largely because of Gingrich.

This was in the pre-ATM era when most congressional members had no D.C.-area bank accounts. Many lawmakers had developed a habit of writing bounced checks, which the so-called "House bank" would always cover. Most thought little of it, since overdrafts were deducted from payroll at the end of the month. Gingrich, however, smelled an election-year scandal he could use to oust Democrats in '92, and hyped it to the press. The ploy boomeranged. Weber himself had recorded 125 overdrafts, and "Rubbergate" forced him to retire rather than face a scandal-plagued re-election campaign.

Today, he says, he harbors no regrets; he had two small children at the time and was thinking of quitting anyway. "I should have announced I was leaving six months before that," he says. "I may have needed the shove of this problem, but it was the right decision for me."

Gingrich looks back on the incident as a serious loss to the Congress. "He has a great deal of wisdom, he understands politics and government brilliantly. He has just remarkable skills," Gingrich says. "There is no question in my mind that had he stayed in Congress, he would have been one of the two or three most important members."

The Superlobbyist

Instead, in 1993, Weber was out of office, taking stock of his life. "I laid out a number of objectives for myself, some of them very broad, some of them much more narrow," he says. "But I decided first of all that I wanted to make some money." A superlobbyist was born.

Within three years, Weber opened a Washington office for the Wall Street management consulting firm Clark & Weinstock. He soon found himself preparing Bill Gates for testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial, and lobbying old congressional colleagues on behalf of AT&T, Freddie Mac, the pharmaceuticals industry and others. With his sterling reputation and ties to then-House Majority Leader Gingrich, Weber rarely found himself waiting outside while delivering his clients' message to the politicians. Weber would indeed make some money.

Larry Noble, executive director for the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, defends lobbying as a cog of democracy, but is troubled when ex-congressional members -- the "superlobbyists" -- enjoy special insider access to legislators. Superlobbyists always get their calls returned; others don't. That makes ex-legislators invaluable for corporations who want assurances their arguments get heard in the corridors of power. "The problem comes when the lobbyists aren't getting their point across only on the merits, but are using such things as campaign contributions or extra connections that other people don't have access to," Noble says.

Two Democratic presidential candidates, John Kerry and John Edwards, campaigned hard against the likes of Vin Weber. Edwards in particular hit hard on the theme of "Two Americas" -- that there is one for the revolving-door lobbyists and special interests who have exclusive access to lawmakers, and one for everybody else -- during his campaign.

Weber actually agrees with some of that, maintaining there should tighter restrictions on lobbyists. He is sympathetic even to the call for a ban on lobbyist campaign contributions, even though his firm raises money for candidates. He suggests he could operate without the money, since doors open for him regardless. "If you've got some other source of access and credibility with policymakers other than campaign money, it's actually sort of in your interests to put restrictions on the ability of lobbyists to give money. Others, he notes, "might have a more difficult time."

University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs cautions those who might be tempted to take the cynical view of Weber the Lobbyist, but he adds it is equally important to gauge him carefully. "This is the sort of paradox of Vin Weber," Jacobs says. "There's the candor, which I think is genuine. ... He's got genuine insights about American politics and society.

"On the other hand, he is a genuine partisan, for both the [GOP] and the interests he's lobbying for," Jacobs adds. "It's easy to slip into -- and I think this is a false view -- this idea that Weber is simply a paid mouth, and he's not worth listening to. The other side of it, though, is the idea that he's just a smart, independent observer who happens to be working for a lobbying group, and I think that's equally naive.

"Vin is a very complicated guy," Jacobs says. "Even when he's spinning you, you don't realize you're being spun."

Old-School Neocon

The University Club, St. Paul: December 2003. Weber is playing conservative pundit to a sympathetic audience -- the conservative Center of the American Experiment. His speech is wide-ranging, spiked with observations on everything from the rightward drift of the American electorate to the Democratic presidential horse race and the Iraq War. It's a good night for that latter topic in this crowd -- Saddam Hussein has just been captured.

As he speaks, Weber credits fellow conservatives with Minnesota's steady drift to the center-right, a tribute, he says, to their victories in the "battle of ideas." He acknowledges that, as a conservative, he's somewhat troubled by the price tag of the Bush administration's massive Medicare expansion, but calls it an opportunity to stave off the "Europeanization" of entitlements by introducing competition. He rails against the Democrats who failed to give the president a "decent" grace period to prosecute war in Iraq before unleashing the hounds: "This president did not get 24 hours to turn Iraq into Ohio."

This is the partisan Weber. But there are other facets, like the policy-wonk Vin, an avocation that keeps him just as busy. Almost immediately after leaving Congress, for instance, he co-founded Empower America, a conservative policy forum he launched with Jack Kemp, William Bennett and Jeane Kirkpatrick; he remains on the board. He is also on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations and is chair of the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded foreign-aid program. He recently rotated off the board of the German Marshall Fund and still works with Penny at the Humphrey Institute. He even has his name on the masthead of the National Review.

If all that work has raised his profile, his name on one particular set of documents has raised eyebrows, particularly among opponents of the neoconservative movement. The neocons are an influential group of Washington hawks that many think forged the doctrine of pre-emptive war -- a strategy under serious question because Saddam's nukes and bioweapons have gone missing. Weber has links to the neocons. He signed a key '98 letter to President Bill Clinton that outlined invasion and regime change as the practical way to eliminate Saddam's mass-destruction threat. Several others who signed -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle -- are now top advisers to Bush.

On Sept. 20, 2001, Weber signed a second letter, which like the first was issued on the letterhead of Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century, home of the neocons. Presaging Bush's stated policy by a year, it again urged Iraq regime change, but this time added a thought. "Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," it says. The Bush White House publicly adopted this line in 2002, though it later became evident the administration was thinking of removing Saddam even before September 2001.

Weber shrugs off the neocon tag: "I've always been a conservative." But he makes no bones about his empathy for the movement, saying it's about judiciously using military might as a force for good. "These are people who really still believe that America has the ideals and set of experiences that could enable the rest of the world to be a much better place," Weber says.

That's not a universal viewpoint. "That's the kind of things the neocons like to say," says William Blum, a progressive Washington journalist and author of Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. "They're not bothered by the fact that we bombed the place to bits, we sanctioned it to bits, we invaded it, we humiliated the people on a daily basis, we use depleted radium in cluster bombs. I could go on and on."

This is the sort of critique Weber railed about at the University Club. "It's very rare in human history," he said then, "that a nation has performed such a selfless act on behalf of another people as we have done in Iraq. And for anybody in the American political community to be harping on this and criticizing it, and not giving it a decent chance for success, is just hugely offensive to me."

Complete, Total, Absolute Sham

Al Franken has done more than anyone lately to shine a spotlight on Weber. The liberal comedian/pundit sourly accuses him in his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, of exploiting Sen. Paul Wellstone's death for Republican gain. Wellstone was barely dead, Franken writes, when Weber got on the phone with John Ashcroft's people, querying them about how to avoid the blunders that resulted in Ashcroft losing a 2000 U.S. Senate election to a corpse. Later, Franken writes, Weber spun an honest outpouring of emotion at the infamous Wellstone memorial into a nefarious DFL plot.

Both stories are basically true: Weber admits he contacted Ashcroft's handlers soon after the crash. And he shot off a blistering e-mail to Star Tribune reporter Dane Smith immediately after the memorial, labeling it "a complete, total, absolute sham" and "a political event."

So is he sorry? Hardly. He stands by his Strib e-mail blast. "I didn't ask anybody if I should do that, I didn't tell anybody I was going to do it, I wasn't in any strategy discussions about it. I had just watched this whole thing and I was unhappy about it, and I thought somebody should say so."

Nor does he apologize for seeking counsel from Ashcroft's folks. "I think that was exactly the right thing to do I think that any Democrat would have done exactly the same thing," Weber says. "What are you going to do? Are you going to stop your campaign? The Democrats didn't stop campaigning. The Democrats were polling before Wellstone's body was removed from the airplane. And I mean, I don't fault them for it."

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, who counts Weber as "a mentor," acknowledges the memorial probably played some role in the outcome, but dismisses the idea that spinmeister Weber is responsible for his triumph over Wellstone surrogate Walter Mondale. "Probably the most strategic thing that happened was Jesse Ventura, the next day, making a comment and saying how terrible [the memorial] was," Coleman remarks. "I don't think Vin got to Jesse."

Pawlenty, who also benefited from independents' rush to the right after the memorial, suggests Franken has obscured Weber's real role. When Mondale was tapped as the Democratic candidate to replace Wellstone, all the smart money was on a DFL landslide. But Weber saw things differently. "Vin understood the kind of shifting and changing nature of Minnesota politics," Pawlenty says. "He just encouraged Norm and others to just hang in there and be respectful, but stay the course in terms of message and principals. And it turned out to be correct."

Weber to Run?

We should expect to see Weber's face trotted about before cable-TV cameras a lot during the present campaign as he takes on the role of Midwest Regional Chairman for President Bush's re-election campaign. "I expect to be a pretty active surrogate for the president," Weber says, quipping, "The president's campaign is nice enough to refer probably more of those opportunities to me than I can take advantage of."

So we know what he'll be doing the next several months. But what about later? Weber is just 51, his kids are growing up, and he maintains a Minnesota residence. While nothing suggests his career as elite adviser/lobbyist is about to end, one might wonder -- could we see Weber's name on a future ballot, perhaps running for governor?

Wy Spano, a DFL analyst and Politics in Minnesota co-editor, thinks so. "I just firmly believe that he's going to do it someday," he says. "That's part of the reason he kept this stuff going, like the Penny-Weber stuff at the Humphrey Institute. I think it's part of the reason he keeps coming back all the time. He keeps his hand in back here more than a super-Washington-lobbyist really has to do."

You could wonder why he'd bother. As Sen. Coleman points out, strategic brilliance is well compensated in Washington, and Weber has the juice. Jacobs likens his role as a Bush adviser to that of a war-room general. By the same analogy, Jacobs says, White House political adviser Karl Rove ranks as a mere staff sergeant. Weber could easily end up a career Washington power broker, says Jacobs, eschewing Minnesota electoral politics for good. Or he could run for office here, formidably. "I think Vin has nothing but options," says Jacobs.

To columnist Broder, Weber remains a work in progress. "Without knowing what his ambitions may be," he says, "I would agree that [Weber] has a significant and probably a larger role to play in the future."

Weber is himself vague, almost blase, about his future. Or is that unfair? Could this be simple sincerity? "If at some point it still makes sense for me to run for office, I'd love to do that," Weber says. "I love being in office. I love public service and I have a fairly strong sense of what's important to sustaining Minnesota's future. But if somebody tells me, 'That will never happen to you, Vin,' I won't lose a minute's sleep over it. I'm pretty happy with the life I've got now."

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Originally published in Minnesota Law & Politics, June/July 2004

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Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.

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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly

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