WASHINGTON
OF all the lessons to emerge from the Jack Abramoff scandal, the most culturally consequential may be just three words long. And it is already being taught as part of an ethics training session for special agents at the F.B.I.
"I'm going to go over a lot of things today, and I can take all of your questions, but let me give you the all-encompassing rule," a lawyer teaching the course began at a recent session in Miami, according to one of the participants.
"Golf," he said, pausing for effect, "is bad."
Golf is bad. The ominous warning can almost be heard echoing across the greens of the political establishment, where the game is not only a cherished pastime but has increasingly become a critical cog in the wheels of campaign financing and lobbying. Lavish political fund-raisers are built around golf tournaments. Fact-finding Congressional trips are tailored to cross paths with golf resorts. Candidates and their supporters spend tens of thousands of dollars on golfing costs each campaign cycle - more and more each year, it turns out - as part of the cost of doing political business.
But now, as the Abramoff ordeal in Washington unfolds, golf is acquiring the whiff of scandal, its exclusive fairways and cozy clubhouses redolent of an improper commerce between money and influence.
There is nothing inherently illegal about mixing politics and golf; as long as everyone pays his own way, it can be as innocent as a game of pickup basketball. But the Abramoff scandal, which suggests that tens of thousands of dollars were spent by lobbying groups to fly lawmakers around the world to play golf, in violation of ethical and perhaps legal strictures, exposes golf as an almost irresistible political carrot that is used to buy favor and access.
Until golf entered the picture, the ethics scandal surrounding Tom DeLay was hard for many to fathom. It involved complicated transactions between obscure political action committees. (Mr. DeLay was indicted last year in Texas in a campaign finance case and has also been under investigation in Washington as part of a wide public corruption case involving lobbyists' efforts to secure legislation for their clients.) The issues are difficult to convey to average voters. But a weeklong $70,000 trip to the golf course in St. Andrews, Scotland, arranged through Mr. Abramoff, as suggested by financial records and participants in the case? To Democrats seeking to exploit the matter, that is the eye-popping stuff of scandal.
More than any other perk - except perhaps free meals and drinks at Mr. Abramoff's upscale restaurant, Signatures - expensive overseas golfing trips have surfaced as his lobbying gift of choice, meant to curry favor with lawmakers and, more often, their underpaid staff members. Golfing fees to courses in the Washington area have also been listed as evidence of attempts at bribing public officials in court documents.
The effect has been, at least for now, to cast a shadow over certain fairways. "I think what we will see here in the current environment is members being pretty careful about getting caught in golfing adventures that don't pass the sunshine test of full disclosure," said Fred Wertheimer, the president of the nonpartisan group Democracy 21 and a longtime advocate of stricter ethics rules in Congress. "How long that will last remains to be seen, particularly for those who are golf-obsessed. There's a certain golf caucus on Capitol Hill, and playing golf is very high on their list of priorities for the country."
Thus the question is raised: What it is about golf that politicians seem so unable to resist, even when their reputations, their very careers, are at stake?
"To be able to play the most challenging golf courses in the world is as good as it gets," said Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, who shares a golfing obsession with his friend Bill Clinton. "That is a dream vacation."
"Other people shouldn't be paying your golfing dues," Mr. McAuliffe quickly added.
For Mr. DeLay, who wears his golfing passion on his plaid pants, the appeal of playing the historic St. Andrews course would have been obvious to Mr. Abramoff, who helped organize a trip for Mr. DeLay and his wife, along with several of Mr. DeLay's aides, to Britain in 2000. Two years later Mr. Abramoff arranged a similar trip for a less obvious lawmaker: Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, who was so unfamiliar with the game, a colleague said, that he had to borrow golf clubs from his son.
Yet according to an e-mail message Mr. Abramoff sent to one of his wealthy Indian tribe clients asking for money that year, Mr. Ney had requested the trip, asking "if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff." That trip - which cost about $100,000 - wound up bringing together the key cast of characters in the Abramoff case, including David H. Safavian, the former Bush administration official indicted last year for allegedly lying to investigators about his dealings with Mr. Abramoff around the time of the golfing trip, and Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition.
Mr. Safavian has said he paid his own way for the trip. Mr. DeLay and Mr. Ney said that a conservative group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, financed their excursions; in the case of Mr. Ney the group has denied paying for the trip. In any event Mr. Abramoff was closely allied with the policy research center, and he funneled thousands of dollars from his clients into its bank accounts around the time of Mr. DeLay's trip.
Although it was not a charge that Mr. Abramoff pleaded guilty to in his settlement with prosecutors, the act of funneling money through a nonprofit, like the policy center, to help fly a lawmaker overseas in exchange for official favors could be considered a bribe. Prosecutors are reviewing all of the trips as part of their investigation.
"Golf has a long, treasured heritage in terms of junkets and even potentially corrupt socializing," said Jan Baran, a lawyer specializing in campaign finance and ethics (and who described himself as "someone who personally doesn't understand or appreciate the allure of golf").
"There are risks both in terms of the amount of money involved in some of these trips and also that the members are actually kind of reaching out and asking for these types of opportunities, in essence soliciting trips," Mr. Baran said.
House ethics rules do not allow lobbyists to pay for members' travel and require lawmakers to disclose gifts and travel from all sources. Private groups are also banned from paying for lawmakers' recreation, including golfing fees. But as demonstrated in the Abramoff case, compliance with those rules is voluntary and sometimes spotty. Who, after all, is keeping watch over lawmakers to see which golf courses they are frequenting, and with whom?
Golf has long held a special place in political life, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower its patron saint and the Burning Tree and Congressional Country Clubs just outside Washington among its holiest grounds. Limited to the upper classes for much of the 20th century, the game was played more by members of the Senate than the House, according to Donald Ritchie, a Senate historian. Yet there have been scandals, big and small, all along the way.
During the alcohol-free era of Prohibition in the 1920's, lawmakers flocked to private golf courses because they could get a drink; President Warren G. Harding sparked a ferocious uproar over the bottle of whiskey he pulled from his golf bag on the greens at the Chevy Chase Club just across the city line in Maryland, according to "First Off the Tee," a history of presidential golf habits written by Don Van Natta Jr., a reporter for The New York Times.
Dan Burton, the Republican congressman from Indiana, came under fire in 1997 for accepting an invitation to play the famous Pebble Beach tournament in California - a lifelong dream of his - at a time when the corporate sponsor of the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am Tournament had business before the committee he led.
President Bush lost his patience on the golf course one morning in August 2002. "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers," Mr. Bush told reporters who asked him about a suicide bombing in Israel the night before as he was stepping up to his first swing. "Thank you. Now watch this drive."
But a vast majority of political golf outings these days take place hidden well out of public view; the remoteness and privacy of golf is one of its appeals to politicians who otherwise live under a microscope. Meeting with campaign contributors and major lobbyists on a golf course allows lawmakers to raise money, get out of the Capitol and do something they enjoy at the same time.
The bonding works in several ways. Sometimes lawmakers or their supporters are the hosts of tournaments where participants pay to play with the guest of honor. At other times lawmakers play a quieter game of golf with a lobbyist who over time becomes a friend, and can help direct bundles of campaign donations from multiple contributors when re-election comes around.
All of which is perfectly legal. Most golfing members of Congress are proud of their participation in the sport, not embarrassed. Representative John Boehner of Ohio, one of the candidates running to replace Mr. DeLay as majority leader, belongs to Burning Tree despite the fact that it doesn't accept women as members.
Even Congressional members from some urban areas treat golf as a fund-raising vehicle. Representative Ed Towns, Democrat of Brooklyn, spent more than $18,000 on overhead for a golf fund-raiser at the Woodcrest Club in Syosset, N.Y. last August, according to campaign disclosure forms.
"They view it as something they must do - they've got to have these fund-raising events, and it's a chore," said Kent Cooper, a co-founder of PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonprofit, nonpartisan service that analyzes campaign finance data. (A full listing can be reviewed on the Web site www.fecinfo.com.)
"The question is, can you make it less of a chore? Can you enjoy it? Can it be fun? As opposed to eating a chicken dinner at a fund-raising event, it can be outside in good weather. You get some exercise."
Mr. Cooper went on to muse: "You sort of wonder, do members of Congress exercise other than golf? Have they moved the smoke-filled room to the green? No one is going to stop them from taking out a cigar on the golf course."
Yeah, yeah, Osama, Osama...blah...blah...blah.
NOW, WATCH THIS DRIVE!
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