...Top sponsorship for a Wednesday night benefit concert at Rockefeller Center costs $250,000. The event is being organized by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee for his World of Hope foundation, which seeks to alleviate AIDS and other health problems in Africa. Frist's aides declined to name top sponsors.
The longest-running convention party is the one being thrown all four nights of the convention to honor Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. It's at the Tunnel, a former nightclub on Manhattan's West Side.
The party-every-night tradition goes back to the GOP's San Diego convention in 1996, where nightly bashes for Boehner — then a member of the House leadership — got a reputation as the best events in town. Boehner's lobbyist friends replicated it at a Philadelphia warehouse in 2000 and are doing it again this year. The effort is led by Bruce Gates, a lobbyist for Washington Council Ernst & Young, a firm whose client list includes employers such as General Electric, Ford, AT&T and Verizon.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois was the honoree at a reception Sunday afternoon sponsored by General Motors at Tavern on the Green, a glittering Victorian gothic restaurant on the edge of Central Park. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States threw a reception at the New York Yacht Club for Rep. Thomas Reynolds of New York, chairman of the party's House campaign committee. And AT&T, Chevron Texaco, Target and Time Warner were among the sponsors of a martinis-and-bowling night for House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier of California....
Those Republicans and lobbyists certainly know how to party. Unfortunately, it also shows that Republicans have opened themselves to be influenced by these groups whose industries might be involved in legislative action in the Congress.