Word: heeler
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...Rosty" the reformer? No one who has watched Congressman Dan Rostenkowski cut a deal with a colleague or swing a golf club with a lobbyist has ever called him that. Indeed, as a former Chicago ward heeler and protege of the late Mayor Richard Daley, he seems to be the quintessential machine pol. Yet, by the peculiar dynamic of politics, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has become the point man for the most ambitious attempt ever at overhauling the loophole-laden tax code. "The reform hat I am wearing is not yet comfortable," Rostenkowski cheerfully confessed...
...drama unfolds in Congress, a pivotal role belongs to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski. It is a rich bit of casting: for the next few weeks, an old-style Chicago ward heeler will be the nation's premier economist-accountant-social philosopher...
...next sessions with Frost he'll talk about his foreign policy triumphs, and try to establish his legacy, his attempt, as he put it, "to build a generation of peace." But Nixon was a hack, not a statesman. He was the ultimate mediocrity, the ad account executive, the ward heeler raised to high office. The only emotion that the interview generates is not pity--Nixon is too warped and amoral for that--but hatred. Let him go east, like Cain, into the land of Nod. In the end, perhaps the best thing that can be said of the interviews...
...accusations raised in the grand jury indictments of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans-along with a notorious financial freebooter and a leading New Jersey Republican-form a sleazy story that might well give pause to even the most hardened ward heeler...
...imaginative insanity began. For example, he gets into some very heavy slander: NBC's John Chancellor (who he seems to like) is a "dope-addled fascist bastard," Muskie is "a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches," and Hubert Humphrey is a "treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current." He doesn't pretend to cover the campaign thoroughly: he ignores some events and deals with others in detail, looking for an essence rather than a careful report...