Joyce Aboussie bio, part 5 of 7
John’s note: Joyce Aboussie is an iconic figure in both Democratic politics and the philanthropic world. In 2002, The Riverfront Times’ DJ Wilson authored an in-depth profile of Aboussie, published in the May 29-June 4 edition of the paper.
The Riverfront Times has since been sold, and Wilson passed away in 2019. To my knowledge, no versions of Wilson’s article remain online today. In the spirit of capturing Aboussie’s most valuable lessons – and to preserve Wilson’s detailed journalism – I’ve captured the original text of the RFT piece with occasional context added. For ease of readability, I’ve split the article up into seven parts, using the same topic breaks originally used by Wilson in the print piece.
— John Combest
Part 1: Joyce Aboussie
Part 2: Ron Casey learns a valuable lesson
Part 3: Joyce Aboussie and Dick Gephardt, Bob Holden, Francis Slay, Jeff Rainford, Richard Callow
Part 4: The Barry Bonds of politics
Article text of Part 5 begins below:
Much of Joyce Aboussie’s power flows from the status, money and power of Dick Gephardt, but that wasn’t always so. She managed Gephardt’s second campaign for Congress in ’78, but the first campaign success that turned heads came in 1980, when Aboussie was in charge of promoting a change in the city charter that would allow city employees to make more than $25,000.
In that drive, she used telephone polling. phone banks and frequent-voter lists to push through a measure that previously had failed to pass. Her political stock rose, and from then on she ran all of Gephardt’s campaigns. A few years later, she was hired full-time by Gephardt, while she still ran Telephone Contact Inc., her polling and political consulting firm, on the side.
That was the beginning of what some still see as a conflict of interest. Others see it us Aboussie cleverly playing both sides of the street. They say that if she wants to take on a client or an issue, she says she’s completely independent of Gephardt; if she doesn’t want to take somebody aboard, she’ll say can’t do it because it would be against Gephardt’s interests. Similarly, Gephardt can distance himself from a candidate or a cause that Telephone Contact Inc. is backing by saying. it’s Aboussie’s separate business and has nothing to do with him.
Not everyone buys this line of reasoning Again, Alderwoman Sharon Tyus makes a comparison to Bill Clay and Pearlie Evans. Tyus doesn’t see how Aboussie would do anything without Gephardt’s approval.
“You don’t think Joyce Aboussie and Dick Gephardt talk? C’mon, OK?” Tyus asks. “Just like with Pearlie, there’d be things she would do where Bill Clay would claim ignorance. Pearlie talked to Bill Clay every day, two or three times a day. He doesn’t have to do that. That’s what you have if you’re a powerful person – you keep your hands clean like that, but that doesn’t mean you’re not touching every button.”
The political hopefuls who seek to hire Aboussie are looking for more than the usual political consultant. It’s an impression that Aboussie doesn’t discourage.
“You buy the whole package when you buy Joyce,” says a local political observer. “You pay a premium for Telephone Contact Inc., and you’re supposed to get all these extras with it – Joyce’s contacts, that she’ll get you in touch with money, she’ll help you do all this stuff behind the scenes. I don’t know that that really works.”
One person putting his criticisms of Joyce Aboussie on the record is John Hancock, executive director of the Missouri Republican Party. He doesn’t buy into the mystique of Aboussie as political powerbroker supreme.
“I actually believe much of her aura is overblown,” says Hancock. “Incumbent members of Congress, wherever they may be, are entrenched animals. There is not a more safe thing in the world to be than an incumbent member of the U.S, Congress They win re-election more than 94 percent of the time. It does not take some kind of shrewd political Svengali to re-elect an incumbent member of Congress time after time after time.”
Plus, Hancock points to the recent St. Louis County Council race in which Creve Coeur Mayor Annette Mandel hired Aboussie but still “lost, and lost going away.” Mandel not only contributed $20.000 to the Democratic Leadership Victory Fund, she spent $40,000 on Telephone Contact Inc. during the campaign.
Her opponent spent less than $10,000 to get similar work done by one of Aboussie’s competitors “It was to do the same kind of voter-contact programs,” says Hancock. “The results speak for themselves.”
It does appear that the tactics that Aboussie pioneered – frequent voter lists and other voter data -are far more accessible to candidates than they were twenty years ago. Whas Aboussie has that other political consultants don’t have is at least fourteen years’ experience fundraising on a national level for a nationally known political leader. The fundraising that Aboussie did for Gephardt’s presidential campaign in 1988 has developed a variety of revenue streams she can tap for a variety of candidates and causes.
One politician puts it this way: “She casts a long shadow. She clearly has a very mythological capacity to raise money. As a result. people defer to her: That becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: This is all about money. Politics usedto run on patronage. Politics today is money, pure and simple.”
The perception that Aboussie can raise large sums of money, sometimes with the cash finding its recipient by way of a circuitous route, is one of her strengths. The other is that she has Gephandt’s ear in matters large and small. And she has control over who has access to that ear.
“She’s pretty much the gatekeeper for Gephardt on a lot of local issues,” says a political veteran. “People strap on the kneepads all the time to go see her. I’ve seen any number of politicians at various functions pay homage to her in a way that you don’t expect.”
Part 6: Gerrymandering Missouri congressional districts
John Combest – Missouri political news headlines