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For this economy to survive, we need only assume a rich and repeated set of exchanges, among people who come to know and trust one another. There has to be opportunity to verify that commitments have been met—eventually. In the meantime, there must be the trust necessary to enable most of the exchange to happen based on trust alone. It must be the sort of place “where one never writes if one can call, never calls if one can speak, never speaks if one can nod, and never nods if one can wink”—precisely how Barney Frank described D.C., borrowing from the words of Boston pol Martin Lomasney.66

As I’ve already described, the seed for the current version of this economy was earmarks. The lobbying firm retainers that secured these earmarks paid for the infrastructure that now gets leveraged to much greater and more powerful ends. Think of earmarks as the pianist’s scales. They teach technique. But the technique gets deployed far beyond scales.

It wasn’t always so. The modern earmarks revolution was born recently, and in a rather unlikely place. Its inventor was a McGovern Democrat, Gerald S. J. Cassidy, and its first target was a grant to support a nutrition research center at Tufts University in 1976. Cassidy and Associates “brought something new to an old game,” Kaiser writes, “by stationing themselves at a key intersection between a supplicant for government assistance, and the people who could respond.”67 Once they did, the supplicants recognized they had tripped upon gold. There were thousands of organizations and individuals keen to get government money spent in a particular way. And if the will of these organizations could be achieved through the camouflage of the earmarking process, they’d be more than eager to pay for it. To pay, that is, both Cassidy (directly) and members of Congress (indirectly).68 By 1984 there were fifteen university clients paying large monthly retainers to Cassidy’s firm, and about a dozen more big companies—all seeking earmarks.69

Cassidy couldn’t patent his brilliant insight (or at least he didn’t—who knows what silliness the patent office would endorse). But as other lobbyists recognized just what was happening, other firms entered the market he originally staked out. Soon an industry was born to complement the practice (and profits) of the lobbyists of before: the product of that industry was a chance at channeling federal spending; the producers of that product were the lobbyists; the beneficiaries of that product were the lobbyists, congressmen, and the interests who might benefit from the earmark. For a time, Cassidy and his colleagues “could truthfully tell clients that they had never failed to win an earmark for an institution that had retained them.”70 Never is a sexy word in the world of political power.

As this economy grew, the lobbyists’ role in fund-raising grew as well. As one lobbyist put it expressly, “I spend a huge amount of my time fundraising… A huge amount.”71 That behavior has been confirmed to me by countless others, not so eager to be on the record. “The most vital people” in this economy, Jeff Birnbaum reports, “aren’t the check writers but the check raisers.”72 “Washington has thousands of lobbyists who raise or give money to lawmakers.”73

At first, some of the old-timers in D.C. worried about the monster that Cassidy had helped birth. As Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.; 1959–2010) put it:

The perception is growing that the merit of a project, grant or contract awarded by the government has fallen into a distant second place to the moxie and clout of lobbyists who help spring the money out of appropriation bills for a fat fee…. Inside the Beltway, everyone knows how the game is played…. Every Senator in this body ought to be repulsed by the perception that we will dole out the bucks if stroked by the right consultant.74

The concern was not just among Democrats. Members from the middle era of the twentieth-century Congress from both parties were unhappy as they watched Congress become the Fund-raising Congress.