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To Be Safe, Politicians Keep Golf at a Distance

By JULIET MACUR

WASHINGTON — Less than 20 miles from the Capitol’s steps, through the buttoned-down section of the city and down a tree-lined parkway, sits a country club founded 87 years ago to give politicians and businessmen a place to loosen up and schmooze.

That club, Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Md., was once the Shangri-La for Washington’s political power brokers, a place to meet “unconstrained by red tape,” as the club’s Web site says. And politicians, including the four United States presidents who are listed among the club’s founding members, took advantage of it.

But times have changed for Congressional, which is hosting the United States Open this week, and for golf itself. With the first round scheduled for Thursday, the scene there is nothing like it was in 1964, when the club hosted its first United States Open, and it has markedly changed since even 1997, when it hosted its second. That was the last time a major tournament was held there.

“Most members of Congress won’t tell you, ‘I’m going to the U.S. Open at Congressional this week,’ simply because these days they would just as soon not be associated with the game of golf,” said the longtime Washington lobbyist Dan Tate Sr., who is one of the area’s top golfers, according to a recent ranking of power brokers by Golf Digest. “Most of them are going to say they are not going, or they are not going to acknowledge that they are going. There’s something wrong there, and it’s a shame, but they have to be aware of appearances.”

The scandal involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his all-expenses-paid golf junkets for politicians like Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, damaged the sport’s dinged reputation in Washington. Then, in 2007, new ethics rules barred lawmakers from accepting meals, travel and gifts from lobbyists or any organization employing them. That pinched the ability of members of Congress and businessmen, the two groups for which the Congressional Country Club was founded, to tee off together.

And now with two wars, a tight economy and a high national unemployment rate, the prevailing belief is that constituents do not want to see their representatives having fun at the golf course.

“Right now, some constituents think that members of Congress playing golf is a big deal and they don’t like it,” Tate Sr., who lobbies for the PGA Tour, said. “There is so much less talk about politicians going fishing or hunting, because that supposedly makes those members of Congress seem more normal. How ambushing and slaughtering another living creature makes you more normal, I have no idea. But it’s all about perception.”

Concerns with perception are not entirely new. President John F. Kennedy was so sensitive about his golf game going public that he forbade photographers from the course. Once he nearly shot a hole in one and was relieved that his ball stopped six inches short because the feat would have made news. In 2003 President George W. Bush said that he gave up golf out of sensitivity to families of fallen soldiers in the Iraq war.

This week politicians were vague about their plans for the Open, if they had any. One might have expected it to be a four-day golf festival for lawmakers when the course was selected as host in 2004.

A special viewing platform near the 16th hole was built for President Clinton in 1997 to watch the Open, but President Obama has not publicly expressed an interest in attending this year’s tournament, nor has he ever played Congressional. Speaker John A. Boehner, who will be in town this weekend, does not have the Open penciled in on his schedule, according to his spokesman Michael Steel.

Obama and Boehner’s own golf competition has trumped the Open, with their first meeting on the links scheduled for Saturday at an undisclosed location. How that outing will play with voters is still unclear.

Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat from Kentucky, worked as a staffer in Congress in the 1970s, and said he “was invited out all the time to go to Congressional,” and that lobbyists would pay. But those days are long gone, he said. Now, the closest he is likely to come to Congressional’s links may be this weekend, if he can find time to attend the Open.

Representative Joe Baca, a California Democrat who heads the Congressional Golf Caucus, a bipartisan group that promotes the sport, also said he would probably not have time to fit in a trip to the Open. Baca said he did not belong to Congressional or any other club in Washington, choosing more often to play on public courses so “you don’t become a part of the snots that belong to the country club areas. You’re amongst the people.”

The clientele at Congressional is undoubtedly exclusive. The initiation fees, which are not publicly disclosed, are more than $100,000, with a reported waiting list of more than seven years.

Tony Russo, a lobbyist at T-Mobile and a former staffer for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., is ranked as Washington’s best golfer and says the hefty initiation fee is worth it because of the club’s amenities, which include two championship golf courses, pools, a bowling alley and junior golf programs. He has been a member for four years. After all, it is not as expensive as some clubs in Arizona, which have initiation fees of $200,000 or $300,000, he said.

This week, though, the biggest perk of being a member of Congressional might be that each member has the option to buy two tickets to the Open each day. But when he was asked if people had been clamoring to be his plus-one for the Open, Russo said no.

Nowadays , like tickets to the Open this year, club membership is arguably less coveted than it was. There are about 1,100 active resident members, and politicians make up less of the membership than they used to, said Ben Brundred, a former president of the club.

“When I was younger, a typical golf foursome might include members of Congress and a doctor,” he said. “Now it’s more doctors and lawyers.”

In the past, Brundred said, members of Congress were given discounted membership rates, so they could afford to join. But that ended in the 1970s, he said.

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said people back home often asked him about Congressional, which, because of its name, they assume is for members of Congress.

“To many of my golf constituents’ dismay, I don’t have a membership,” said Udall, who is considered the top golfer in Congress. “I haven’t played there. I can’t get them in there.”

But he may go this weekend.

“I think I can find a way to go one of the days,” he said. “But I want to be clear. I’d be paying for those tickets.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research from St. Petersburg, Fla.

And...

...if you were wondering about that article on how the other half lives, the pee-ons who do the actual work...the ones asked to make more and more sacrifices so that the "powers that be" can continue to live the good life, well, read on...

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States Want More in Pension Contributions

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

First came the pay freezes and unpaid furloughs. Then came the higher contributions for health insurance. Now, in the most definitive sign yet that the era of generous compensation for public-sector employees is ending, workers in more than half the states face the prospect of paying more of their salary toward their pensions.

So far this year, eight states, including Wisconsin and Florida, have decided to require government employees to contribute more, sometimes far more, to their pensions. Governors and legislators in 10 other states, including California and Illinois, are proposing their own pension changes as they grapple with budget deficits and underfunded pension plans.

Government employees’ unions are not accepting these changes without a fight, complaining that the increased pension contributions often amount to a significant cut in take-home pay.

A burst of labor opposition in New Jersey is threatening a tentative deal between the Republican governor, Chris Christie, and Democratic legislative leaders that would require government employees to contribute at least one percentage point more of their pay toward their pensions. One powerful union warned Democratic lawmakers not to join Mr. Christie’s “war on the middle class.”

But even many of labor’s traditional allies are demanding pension changes. Last week, New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, proposed that all future state and New York City employees pay 6 percent of their salary toward their pensions, double the current 3 percent. Oregon’s Democratic governor is pushing state and local employees to contribute as much as 6 percent of pay, up from zero at present. Twelve states, including Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia, imposed higher employee contributions in 2010. That leaves just a handful of states where employees do not contribute toward their pensions.

“You can call this an exponential increase in activity to have state employees contribute more,” said Ronald Snell, a pension expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Before 2010, this hardly ever happened.”

States are demanding the higher contributions as they reach for new ways to cut budget deficits. The easy savings, like furlough days, have been achieved, and now lawmakers are tackling more complicated cost issues like the long-term shortfalls in their pension funds.

The Pew Center on the States estimates there is a more than $1 trillion funding gap for government workers’ retirement benefits in the 50 states. At the same time, many voters resent that public employee pensions are generally better than their own.

“States have less revenues coming in and higher bills for their pensions, and it’s really focused their attention,” said Susan K. Urahn, managing director of the Pew center, a nonpartisan research group.

Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi and Oklahoma have all acted this year to require employees to pay more.

In one of the most extreme proposals, a legislative committee in Illinois, daunted by the state’s estimated $80 billion pension shortfall, voted to have state workers either contribute 17 percent of their pay toward their pensions or accept less generous pension benefits.

According to the Pew Center, actuarial reports say the 50 states should have contributed $117 billion in 2009 toward their pension plans to help bring them to full funding, two and a half times more than they contributed a decade ago and well over the $73 billion they actually contributed in 2009.

Requiring employees to divert 3 to 6 percent of their paychecks toward funding their pensions will help, though it will not come close to solving the short-term budget problems in most states, Ms. Urahn said. But every bit helps. In Wisconsin, for example, Gov. Scott Walker said the state government would save $226 million a year from state employees’ paying a 5.8 percent contribution previously paid by the state.

Over time, the budgetary savings can be substantial. Because of New York’s constitutional limits on changing current workers’ pensions for the worse, Mr. Cuomo is proposing increased pension contributions for new employees only. But even so, his office says this change would save New York State and public employers outside New York City $50 billion over 30 years.

“The pension system as we know it is unsustainable,” Mr. Cuomo said last week. He added that his proposal would “bring government benefits more in line with the private sector while still serving our employees and protecting our retirees.”

Many government employees and their unions are fuming about these pension changes, saying that they have become scapegoats for state fiscal problems. Denis M. Hughes, president of the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O., said Mr. Cuomo should consider other alternatives before demanding higher pension contributions.

“It would be fairer to raise taxes on the rich than to hit struggling middle-class workers like that,” he said. He argued that it would be awkward and bad for employee morale if a group of employees hired on a given day had to pay 6 percent of salary toward their pensions, while a group hired the week before had to pay just 3 percent.

Increased pension contributions are just part of the hit that many public sector workers have been asked to take. Wage freezes, unpaid furlough days and higher health insurance contributions are common, and many states have taken steps beyond raising worker contributions to cut their pension obligations. Those include delaying the age for full retirement, adopting a less generous formula for pension calculations and requiring more years of work before pensions are vested.

Heather Conroy, executive director of Oregon’s largest local of the Service Employees International Union, estimates that her members’ take-home pay could be cut by 12 to 20 percent if workers were required to begin paying 6 percent toward their pensions above and beyond other concessions being demanded.

“This is going to be very painful to our members,” Ms. Conroy said. “Not many workers can afford to contribute 6 percent of their pay toward their pensions.”

Unions have long argued that government employees contribute more toward their pensions than the public believes. They note that workers often gave up raises or made other concessions in previous years in exchange for having the state pick up their pension contributions.

But with tales of six-figure pensions and public employees comfortably retiring in their early 50s, many lawmakers say it is outrageous that some of these workers pay nothing out of pocket toward their pensions.