It seemed only fitting to greet David McIntosh, a precocious captain in the Republican revolution, with a plastic bottle of Brooks Rich and Tangy Ketchup, “made from the heart of the Hoosier Sweet Tomato.”
For days now I’d watched McIntosh, a freshman congressman from Muncie, Ind., who possesses degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago Law School, leading the anti-regulatory push that’s contained in the “Contract With America.”
And since he was late for our appointment, and I was bored enough to pluck the product from Mt. Summit, Ind., off his, I decided to quickly confront him with a question not convulsing the Hoosier State, especially during the social and cultural extravaganza of basketball season:
“So, what’s wrong with the way the government oversees Brooks Rich and Tangy Ketchup?”
It did seem a more promising opening than inquiring about the autographed photos of Ronald Reagan and former McIntosh boss Dan Quayle, or the poster from a conservative legal group, the Federalist Society.
The walls were rather bare, the room austere. The clearest measure of his newfound importance was the hand-scrawled note taped to the desk chair, awaiting his arrival, and signaling his lofty new political perch: “D.M., 7:30 Tonight, Mtg w Speaker, H-232, Re: Food Stamps.”
McIntosh, representative of central Indiana’s 2nd District, inspected the Food and Drug Administration-mandated nutritional label on the ketchup, smiled and said: “Say somebody did research and found that ketchup reduced cancer. You couldn’t put that on the label until the FDA approved the cancer study. And you couldn’t write, `Low Cholesterol,’ because you’d be deceiving people into thinking it was low fat.
“My view is to give consumers accurate and true information, but don’t be paternalistic. Let them decide what they want to eat, especially since the regulatory process is not up on the latest information and the whole system is so slow.”
Welcome to the universe of McIntosh, former executive director of then-Vice President Quayle’s pro-business and highly secretive Council on Competitiveness and chairman of the spanking new (take a breath) House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs.
This apparently makes McIntosh, 36, the first freshman Republican to head a committee since a Californian named Nixon did it in 1947 (if one doubts that, maybe one can doublecheck through some new, Newt Gingrich-inspired House Oversight Subcommittee on Congressional History, Bureaucratic Rhetoric, Whitewater, Affirmative Action, and the Works of Alvin and Heidi Toffler).
McIntosh is a native of Kendallville, Ind., and one of four children raised by a nurse after her husband died when David, the eldest, was 5. He helped pay his way through Yale by working at a nearby foundry in the summer.
While in law school at the U. of C., his prime intellectual influences were two strong-minded conservative (though far from philosophically identical) law professors: Richard Epstein and Antonin Scalia, now a Supreme Court justice.
He came away holding to a world view often associated with the U. of C.’s law and economics movement and generally referred to (a bit too literally) as cost-benefit analysis.
After several years of laboring in the Los Angeles office of a large Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin, he headed to Washington and various jobs, ranging from one in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration to the competitiveness council.
When the Bush-Quayle team lost in 1992, he planted new roots in Muncie, a town that inspired the “Middletown,” or allegedly typical American town, studied by Robert and Helen Lynd and other sociologists in the 1920s and ’30s. He arrived with his new wife, Ruthie, a onetime Barbara Bush aide whom he met as a result of sitting next to her desperately-seeking-a-son-in-law mother at church.
After working briefly at a conservative think tank in Indianapolis, he decided to run for the seat held by retiring liberal Democrat Phil Sharp, and he defeated a well-financed Democrat, Joe Hogsett.
Now he’s Mr. Anti-Regulation, attacking many existing rules and proposing a moratorium on enforcing ones passed since November. In doing so, he has frequently dueled with liberal Chicago Democratic Rep. Cardiss Collins, which got me to thinking.
Much of the debate has been a mix of the arcane and esoteric, so I asked the cerebral McIntosh to state his basic case about government intrusion by coming down to Earth somewhat and taking me on a hypothetical trek from Collins’ Chicago district to Muncie.
He’d get into a car that, if manufactured in California, could cost as much as $1,200 more due to extra equipment needed to meet the state’s fuel-emission standards, he said.
He’d make it to the Chicago Skyway and pass the Calumet River. One can’t put a new factory in near the river, he said, because of wetlands regulations. Meanwhile, clean-air regulations mean the steel mills of Gary, which still “smell bad, though they’ve removed emissions at a high cost,” wind up at a price disadvantage against foreign competitors and have lost tons of jobs. Arriving in Muncie, he’d pass an area where Nestle was to locate a factory. But that proved to be a potential wetland and, bowing to environmental regulations, it built the plant in Ft. Wayne.
At the grocery store, “folks will tell you that if you spend $50, $5 covers the cost of food preparation, labeling and workplace regulations. It would be similar, he said, at the nearby drug store. A pad to detect breast cancer can’t be found because the FDA hasn’t approved it yet, while prescription drugs are more expensive than necessary because of a slow regulatory process.
A basketball game that night at a local arena? It might be cheaper, he believes, for the local bus company to put disabled fans in taxis rather than build buses with handicap-accessible doors, while the arena builder was needlessly forced to construct larger elevators and different ramps to meet federal disabilities laws.
He’s a true believer, some would say a zealot-though his forays into the district, and meeting real folks, might wind up tempering his anti-regulation passions.
And of course, even McIntosh and the new majority may come up short as they confront Washington’s most potent force, the status quo.
“The message here is, `Slow down-here’s why you shouldn’t do this or that.’ Working in government is a little like wading in wet cement.”
Cokie watch
Last week brought the curiosity of ABC News’ Cokie Roberts and husband Steve, a magazine reporter, possibly doing business with Philip Morris by appearing at a private gathering in West Palm Beach, Fla.
The firm is suing ABC for $10 billion, claiming ABC’s “Day One” falsely accused the industry of artificially spiking the nicotine in cigarettes. It would seem a bit unseemly for an ABC employee to be taking its money these days.
An internal pamphlet indicated that a breakfast session for important Philip Morris customers was “Change in Washington: A Media Perspective with Cokie and Steve Roberts.” Folks at the conference were told that was the plan, said one person who was at the gathering but not the breakfast.
Through a spokeswoman, Cokie Roberts said last week that this all had to be a mistake. Roberts knew nothing about her publicized involvement. It was her husband who was scheduled, alone, and took Philip Morris’ money.
On Friday, a Philip Morris spokesman said that the Robertses were booked as a team and that Cokie “called to say she was sick and couldn’t make it.” Steve was excellent, he said.
On the gravy train
And I thought the health-care-reform gravy train for reporters had ended last year:
Appearing for pay at a Group Health Association of America legislative conference here last week-arguing about “How Will the 104th Congress Act on Health Care?”-was a roadshow of CNN’s “Crossfire”: Michael Kinsley, John Sununu and Washington Post reporter Juan Williams.
1st Amendment footnote: The journalists’ contract forbid the airing of the appearance by C-Span or anybody else.
