Keith Epstein

Congresswoman Takes Care of 'My People'

THE PLAIN DEALER
Sunday, October 11, 1992

By KEITH EPSTEIN
PLAIN DEALER BUREAU

WASHINGTON

When the government refused to give Neil Viny a tax break for restoring Cleveland’s historic Hoyt Block, he asked again. And again. He appealed four times. Four times, the government said no.

Rep. Mary Rose Oakar first intervened in 1987. She called the director of  the National Park Service. He said Viny’s case was viewed “in the most  favorable light possible.” Still the answer was no.

About a year later, her brother, James, moved his law offices to Viny’s  building, which is a Warehouse District landmark on St. Clair Avenue. Viny himself was a contributor to her campaign.

Finally, last October, Oakar went to the top — to Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan. Advisers urged Lujan, a member of the president’s Cabinet, to stand  firm — or face complaints about “circumventing” the usual rules, and of  “favoritism,” according to park service internal memos.

Instead, Viny got another rehearing — and his partnership got a one-time  tax credit of some $750,000.
Oakar’s help for a hometown developer illustrates one reason for her  political longevity. She has her share of critics and controversies. Yet even her enemies marvel that she never forgets the defining principle of her 15 years in Congress: Take care of your people — and they will take care of you.


She often speaks of “my people.”

Grant Bloom is one of Oakar’s people. He lives in public housing. When he  thought he was overcharged $7 for air conditioning, Oakar wrote to government  officials questioning the bill.

John Mariakis is one of Oakar’s people. When a mortgage company overcharged him $966, Oakar wrote a letter of protest to the lender – in Arkansas.

As if Oakar were still in City Council, rather than the world’s most  powerful legislature, she has recommended clerk-typists, consultants, friends, relatives and former staffers for jobs.

Once, she took up the cause of a West 180th Street homeowner over a  neighbor’s use of two parking spaces.
Cuyahoga County Democratic Chairman John Coyne calls her “one of the Moms.” Coyne happens to be Brooklyn’s mayor, but some of his citizens would still  rather call Oakar about problems in Brooklyn.

Senior citizens flock to her with their Social Security problems. They  plead with her to remedy mistakes in Medicare and doctors’ bills.

“She loves … cultivating the image that a call to her office is like a  visit to Lourdes,” observes a colleague, Rep. Dennis Eckart. “Miracles happen. People are cured. Problems are fixed.”

In Cleveland, voters see a woman with a friendly smile and a handbag slung  over her shoulder who lives in a modest duplex on West 30th Street. In  Washington she owns a pair of homes worth close to $400,000 each (one of which she rents out), and earns a salary of $129,500.

This fall she is seeking her ninth term in office. Republican Martin Hoke  is her challenger.

A former high school teacher who worked her way through college as a  telephone operator, Oakar can hardly be described as glib or slick, the way  others in Congress can. Yet she is on a first-name basis with powerful people, and she knows how Washington works.

“She doesn’t come across as a politician, so people trust her,” observes  Coyne. “You’d buy a used car from her, you know. But don’t let it fool you.  She’s streetwise.”

When David Ogden Maxwell left as chairman of the Federal National Mortgage  Association (Fannie Mae) last year, he got a $26 million retirement package.  Some members of Congress were alarmed.

“Appalling,” said Rep. Charles Schumer, D-NY.

Oakar, meanwhile, defended such golden parachutes at the taxpayer-backed  mortgage institution as “comparable pay” for comparable worth. Her arguments  for pay equity usually are intended for poorly paid women in a male-dominated  work force, not the likes of Maxwell.

And as chief of the banking subcommittee that oversees Fannie Mae, Oakar  could act upon her sentiment. When Democratic colleagues tried to limit  executives’ salaries, Oakar deftly countered by writing her own amendment,  which set no limits. Most members of her subcommittee supported her.

Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy, a member of her committee, accused her  of kow-towing to wealthy campaign supporters. Maxwell and his wife are among  her contributors.

Oakar also has received money from Fannie Mae’s lobbyists, executives and  political action committee. All told, she has received $7,750. Before the ban  on congressional honoria, she received another $6,000 in speaking fees.
On the floor of the House last September, Kennedy, a fellow Democrat,  angered Oakar when he said Fannie Mae had been “trying to influence votes”  with campaign contributions.

She shot back that Kennedy was “impugning … the reputation of members”  when he “said … we are controlled by special interests.” She added: “I do  not think for one minute that any one member on that committee has acted  without integrity.”

Oakar’s grateful constituency extends beyond the boundaries of her West  Side district. Many of those she helps, like Maxwell, aren’t even from Ohio.  The list of her connections among the powerful and wealthy range from Capitol  Hill to California and Nigeria.

Cleveland’s former Ameritrust, with former Oakar aide Peter Brereton as a  lobbyist, benefited from Oakar’s insertion in a 1989 savings and loan bill of  a provision allowing bank holding companies to acquire thrifts immediately,  instead of waiting five years.

Other big banks benefitted too – major institutions like NCNB, Chemical  Bank, Bank America Corp. and Banc One. Since 1989, they and the Association of Bank Holding Companies have contributed more than $10,000 to Oakar campaigns.
The “Oakar amendment,” as the banking industry still calls it, was created  by a group of lobbyists for such big regional banks. A consulting firm helping the lobbyists, the Secura Group, also has been a regular donor to Oakar’s  campaigns.
In December 1987, Oakar helped arrange a little-noticed, last-minute  amendment to a banking bill. It allowed seven small banks in Massachusetts,  known as “cooperative” banks, to leave an insolvent federal insurance program, said Richard Bolton Sr., president of one of them, Pioneer Financial.

Two months later, Bolton and other Massachusetts bankers and developers at  a fundraiser gave Oakar’s campaign $10,000. “She helped us in that situation,  and we support people who support us,” explained Bolton. “She’s a good friend  of Massachusetts bankers.”

Lawrence J. White, a former official on the federal Bank Board, called the  measure “a loophole giving those institutions special treatment over many  others.” He said it saved the seven banks millions of dollars in premiums.
Oakar also has received re-election sums from Florida sugar growers,  Occidental Petroleum, Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens and pharmaceutical  multimillionaire Milan Panic, now the Yugoslav prime minister. Since 1987,  more than 70 cents of every dollar Oakar has raised came from “her people”  beyond Ohio’s borders – mostly from bankers, developers, doctors, unions and  other special interests.

Oakar has forged a reputation in Congress for bringing millions of federal  dollars home to her district, championing the interests of women and older  Americans, and defending average citizens.

Important steps in the city’s rebirth such as Tower City, Playhouse Square  Center and the Main Avenue Bridge reconstruction owe much to Oakar’s zeal in  bending federal programs to local purposes.

Her supporters say that if voters hand the 10th district to a Washington  outsider – Hoke – they would be casting off the clout of one of Ohio’s most  entrenched and effective politicians, a hometown healer for a sometimes ailing community.

“There’s not one revitalization project in the city she hasn’t played a  role in getting the dollars for,” said Brereton, the former Oakar aide and  Ameritrust lobbyist now working for Society National Bank.

Oakar’s top campaign donors include the Ratner family, which owns Forest  City Enterprises, developer of Tower City; in five years, the family and  company executives have given more than $30,000.

Albert Ratner, the company’s president, would say only, “We support people  we believe in. I’ll just let the contributions speak for themselves.”

Nationally, Oakar has fought for money for breast cancer research, urged  better pay for women, and argued the government should provide health care to  all Americans.

Less publicly, she champions Lebanon. She has visited the nation  repeatedly, tracing her ancestral roots and meeting withtop leaders. She has  been instrumental in tripling foreign aid to the war-torn nation.

Still, she sometimes angers Arab-Americans by refusing to agree with their  full agenda.

“Arab-Americans have complained she doesn’t give gung-ho, blank-check  support,” observes James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute.  “She’s just being consistent. She doesn’t support arms sales because she  doesn’t support arms sales anywhere.”

Oakar often rails against military spending. In the days after winning the  June 2 primary, Oakar missed 13 votes involving overall spending in the  Pentagon budget.

There are other seeming inconsistencies.

She demands more federal dollars in the war against cancer, yet accepts  money from the tobacco lobby.

She railed against Desert Storm as risking world war and wasting money,  then took advantage of the war’s popularity by posing with Gen. Norman  Schwarzkopf and praising the troops.

She once pledged her congressional pay raises to a scholarship fund, but  then started keeping raises, and shut down the fund.

She champions downtown development, yet took no stand on whether to finance the Gateway stadium with a “sin” tax.

She pledged to oppose using fetal tissue in medical research, but urged  colleagues to support it. Then she missed the vote because she was out  campaigning.

In June, as voting began on whether military hospitals abroad should  perform abortions, witnesses saw her leave the chamber. Later, she voted “yes” to the overall defense budget package that required military hospitals to  conduct abortions. In an Aug. 31 interview with Merle Pollis on WHK radio,  Oakar declined to meet a caller’s repeated requests for a “definitive stand”  on abortion. On Oct. 2 Oakar was the only one among 20 Democratic women who  backed President Bush’s veto of an abortion counseling bill.

Noting that a member of her family was born on the Fourth of July, she once vowed to support a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. Then she  opposed it; she said she didn’t want to tamper with the Constitution.

Overall, her record – like that of many of her colleagues – includes little major legislation.

Many of the bills bearing Oakar’s name alone do little more than designate  certain days as times to remember certain classes of citizens – such as foster parents or girls in sports.

And one recent proposal that could prove expensive to taxpayers protects  automatic cost-of-living increases in federal workers’ pensions – including  her own. Oakar is a member of the civil service committee. Among her  contributors are people whose retirement can be affected by her decisions. The political action committee of the National Association of Retired Federal  Employees has, since 1985, given Oakar the maximum allowed – a total of  $40,000 ($5,000 for each primary and $5,000 for each general election).

That increase to the pension plan prompted Olive Hunt, a spokesperson for  the National Committee on Public Employee Pension Systems, a private watchdog  group, to call Oakar “the godmother” of federal cost-of-living raises.

Oakar’s enjoyment of the perquisites of power – from the manipulation of  congressional payrolls to benefit aides, to use of the House Bank where she  wrote 213 overdrafts in 39 months without penalty – has fueled the perception  of her as a Washington insider.

Observes Eckart, a fellow Democrat: “She’s built a career around currying  friendships and favors from the powerful in Washington, while telling everyone back home she was still Miss Next Door.”

She knows how to reward with patronage jobs, how to strike deals with other members of Congress, and how to engineer personnel changes. She often focuses  on parochial Capitol Hill causes such as pay inequities at the congressional  beauty salon.

Once, jockeying among peers for an internal leadership post, she dispatched couriers in tuxedos to deliver chocolate roses. Some congressmen got chocolate Terminal Towers, too. (But she lost the in-House election among fellow  Democrats.)
She also buys more legal advice than the average American.

Charles E. C. Ruff represented Oakar in a 1987 ethics inquiry. Oakar had  kept a woman living in New York on her Washington payroll, and she also gave  pay raises to a different woman employee with whom she bought a $259,000  home.
Oakar had to repay the Treasury $45,386 for the New Yorker’s salary after  the ethics committee concluded she had “directly violated” federal law and  House rules. Although the ethics panel found “no evidence of improper action”  involving the purchase of the townhouse, she and her former housemate sold  it.

Ruff, a former Justice Department official and Watergate special  prosecutor, defended Sen. John Glenn in the Keating Five banking scandal. His  high-powered Washington law firm is Covington & Burling.

Until three years ago, Oakar’s campaign paid Covington & Burling only small sums to periodically review her campaign finances, and reported no debts to  the firm. Then in May 1989 the campaign reported higher payments and debt.  Since then the campaign has paid more than $37,000 to Ruff’s firm and still  owes $11,630.

Ruff declined to explain the debt or his current efforts except that “it  doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the House Bank, the House Post  Office, the House mail box, or the House front lawn.”

As chief counsel to the House Ethics Committee, Ralph Lotkin headed the  1987 inquiry of Oakar. Now in private practice, he said he is helping Oakar  with the House Bank inquiry. “I don’t see how there could possibly be a  conflict,” he said.

Lawyer Don C. Iler represents Oakar in a libel suit against The Plain  Dealer over articles about investigations at the House Post Office.

So far, the suit has had the practical effect of helping Oakar avoid  contact with Plain Dealer reporters or answering their questions, even on  topics unrelated to the post office. Although she routinely mails newsletters  to constituents, her chief spokesman, James W. Belles, refused to make copies  available to PD reporters.

Oakar’s colleagues sometimes envy her deft touch behind the scenes in  Washington; they also wish they had her knack for obtaining last-minute  campaign financing.

Only days before the June primary, Oakar got a two-month loan of $100,000  from Society National Bank, backed by the savings of Oakar’s relatives. To pay it off, Oakar arranged a loan from a small bank in Boston.

The Boston lender, Haymarket Cooperative Bank, asked Oakar to pledge her  salary plus $485,000 in estimatedcontributions. Bankers call this “soft”  collateral because such assets don’t exist.

Sam Pincich, an expert for the Savings and Community Bankers of America,  said the terms sounded “extraordinary … not the garden variety loan … You  and I certainly don’t borrow on the basis of intangibles.”

Haymarket executives boasted of being more flexible than most bankers. They said Oakar’s connection was one of the bank’s big customers, whom they  declined to name. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Oakar’s mentor, is a  friend of Frank Viola, Haymarket’s politically well-connected president, but  Viola said O’Neill was not the connection.
He also said she received no special treatment, and since Haymarket was not one of the cooperative banks Oakar benefited in her 1987 legislation, there is no indication of a conflict of interest.

Viola, while unwilling to discuss Oakar’s loan specifically, stressed the  bank’s untraditional loans to other applicants in need, such as Angolan and  Russian refugees – borrowers of little risk, and virtually no assets.