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That's because in the Washington money game, where you sit matters more than where you're from. And for the last four years, Livingston has sat atop the Appropriations Committee, deciding where billions of federal dollars are spent.
And the defense industry, a big suitor before Livingston's committee and one he has helped spare from harsher spending cuts, accounted for as much as $1 in every $5 he raised during his 1996 re-election bid. The defense contractors are hardly alone.
A review of Livingston's federal campaign records shows that when spending recommendations cross his desk, related special interest money is never far behind. For instance:
n The drug company Schering-Plough contributed $10,370 to Livingston's re-election committee and a separate leadership political action committee he formed in the last year. Livingston ultimately backed the company's unsuccessful efforts in the closing weeks of the congressional session to gain a patent extension for its anti-allergy drug Claritin. Schering-Plough lobbyist Robert Lively also provided $448 worth of tickets to a Baltimore Orioles game to assist a Livingston related fund-raiser.
-Chrysler Corp. contributed $5,000 to Livingston's leadership PAC on Oct. 3 and $2,000 to Livingston's re-election committee on Oct. 6, as the final spending bill was being written. The legislation prevented the federal government from increasing the fuel efficiency standard for light trucks and cars.
-In the spring, the House debated whether to impose new standards on managed care health organizations. Livingston's PAC received $2,000 from Blue Cross-Blue Shield, one of the leaders of the lobbying effort to block new regulations, and $7,500 from two members of the anti-regulation lobbying group Healthcare Leadership Council: Tenet Healthcare Corp. and the U.S. Surgical Corp.
"Livingston's profile reflects political reality in Washington," said Larry Makinson, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions. "It's not where you're from, it's where you sit. He sits on the Appropriations Committee."
For years, the only avenue special interests had to donate to Livingston was his campaign committee.
With his political profile growing, the Louisiana Republican in March formed a PAC to collect additional money that he can use to spend on political travel or to sow good will with contributions to GOP colleagues.
In just half a year, Livingston's Building our Bases PAC, had collected a whopping $1.1 million. Much came from interests with business pending before the Appropriations Committee.
"We are here to raise money for Republican candidates," said John Emling, executive director of Livingston's leadership PAC. "The timing of the contributions? We get them when they're sent."
Becoming a chair of the Appropriations Committee only boosted Livingston's fund-raising prowess. In the 1994 election cycle, before Republicans took control of Congress, he raised $368,522.
In the two elections since, he's raised about $1 million each time for his personal campaign treasury.
The defense industry has helped lead the way. His two most generous givers hail far from his home state: Textron, based in Rhode Island, which contributed $43,000 over the last decade, and Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which has given $39,800.
"You have natural allies," Emling said. "Bob is a defense hawk. It's logical that defense-related industries are going to support him. We've had a dialog with them for years."
Livingston has taken pride in helping to spare the Pentagon the same sort of paring that other agencies have endure in the drive to balance the federal budget.
"We do not apologize for trying to maximize the dollars we put into this bill and provide for the national defense of this country," Livingston declared last June.
"He's been an articulate advocate for our industry," Lockheed Martin spokesperson Charles Manor explained. "We have a high comfort level with Bob Livingston."
Administration officials were considering signing the agreement, reached last year in Kyoto, Japan, to give a boost to a climate conference this week in Argentina. Diplomats from some 160 countries were at the conference, working on achieving the agreement's goals of reducing heat-trapping greenhouse emissions.
The treaty requires industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse emissions by 2012 to levels some 5 percent below what they were in 1990. Administration officials said the agreement would be signed before March, but could be signed as early as this week.
The likelihood the treaty would be signed soon prompted U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-Detroit), to pull out of attending the climate conference in Buenos Aires.
Michigan congressmen have been outspoken in arguing the treaty would hurt the economy as the United States would be asked for large cuts in its emissions.
"It would mean devastating economic consequences for the American people, particularly in Michigan," U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Bloomfield Hills) said before leaving to attend the weeklong conference with other congressional colleagues.
Many scientists believe Earth is gradually warming because of what are known as greenhouse gas emissions - mainly carbon dioxide from automobiles, factories and power plants.
The United States, with 4 percent of the world's population, accounts for nearly one-quarter of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. But China, with its rapidly developing economy, is expected to surpass the United States in about two decades.
Knollenberg said key developing countries such as China and India also must agree to limit their emissions because they account for a significant portion of the world's population.
"What they (treaty negotiators) have outlined is nothing more than a wealth transfer," Knollenberg said. "Developing countries will be free to do whatever they want to, pollute at will."
However, some members of Congress, including Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), supported a treaty signing, saying it would bolster U.S. credibility in taking a leadership role and "persuading developing nations to become a part of the solution."
Dingell disagreed, saying the timing of the treaty signing would leave little room to make sure developing nations participate.
"This shatters any pretense of congressional consultation or hard-nosed negotiation," the Dearborn, Mich., lawmaker said.
"The timing of this signing only encourages countries who refuse to be part of any effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions," said Dingell. "We will have signed a bad treaty. It leaves the bulk of the burden and the expense and the economic sacrifice to the United States, its industries and its workers."
The treaty must be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which has already signaled its opposition to the agreement unless it is changed to include developing nations.
In one of the closest races of the general election, the initiative to help finance various health care and education services for children was approved by a margin of 57,070 votes among more than 7.6 million ballots counted.
About one-third of the estimated 850,000 late absentee and provisional ballots remain uncounted. But the initiative's lead has been growing steadily since the election night count concluded with it leading by just 13,000 votes.
"Today we are announcing victory for the children of California," Reiner told a cheering crowd at the UCLA Child Care Services facility in Los Angeles. "It was a very, very tough fight. We had, unfortunately, a very formidable foe in the tobacco industry."
Reiner said political activists around the country have been calling him to discuss plans for similar efforts in their states, and he plans to support those efforts.
The tax increase from 37 cents to 87 cents per pack takes effect Jan. 1. The measure imposes proportional increases on other tobacco products. The additional 24-cent-per-pack federal cigarette tax remains unchanged.
The constitutional amendment was designed to generate an estimated $700 million annually for social services aimed at families with children under 5, including prenatal care, stop-smoking programs, immunizations and domestic violence prevention.
Critics said the measure would create a new bureaucracy and could take away from programs now funded by existing cigarette taxes by cutting cigarette sales.
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Speaking to members of Parliament, an irritated Primakov aimed his comments at Anatoly Chubais, a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin, who said after negotiating a huge IMF bailout this summer that Russia had "conned" international financial institutions out of $20 billion.
Since Chubais' remark - first reported by the Kommersant Daily newspaper and then by the Los Angeles Times - Russia's efforts to secure a much-needed $4.3 billion installment of the IMF loan have been unsuccessful.
Russia also has faced difficulty in securing foreign loans because it squandered the $4.8 billion it received from the IMF in the first installment of the $22.6 billion loan package negotiated by Chubais.
The money, largely spent to prop up the ruble, disappeared into the hands of bankers and investors within weeks.
Russia, with its economy in shambles and no clear plan to resolve its fiscal crisis, is desperately in need of cash. First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri D. Maslyukov said Saturday that the government must find $3.5 billion this year and $17.5 billion next year just to repay debts.
At a meeting yesterday with members of Parliament's lower house, lawmakers asked Primakov to find new negotiators to take over the ongoing talks with foreign lenders.
"You suggest that we replace the negotiators. With whom?" the prime minister asked. "I want to ask you a question: with the person who said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that we conned you out of $20 billion? Do you think they (the IMF) will talk to him? No one will talk to him."
Chubais, a key architect of Russia's economic transformation who ran Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign and later served as his chief of staff, could not be reached for comment yesterday. His spokesperson, Andrei V. Trapeznikov, said he could not comment on Primakov's statement because he and Chubais had not discussed the matter.
In the lengthy Sept. 8 interview with Kommersant Daily, which was quoted in The Times a day later, Chubais was asked whether the government had the right to lie about Russia's fiscal instability.
"In such situations, the authorities have to do it," Chubais told Kommersant. "We ought to. The international financial institutions understand, despite the fact that we conned them out of $20 billion, that we had no other way out."
Chubais, 43, praised by Western newspapers in the past as a "young reformer," bitterly denounced The Times for its article reporting that he said Russia had "conned" the international community out of the money by hiding the severity of the country's economic crisis.
In one interview, Chubais charged that he was the victim of an attack by "the opponents of Russia."
In a letter widely distributed to news organizations, Chubais wrote that The Times article "absolutely distorted" his position; it was investors, he wrote, not international financial institutions, who were "cheated" out of $20 billion.
But yesterday was not the first time that Chubais' words have come back to plague the new government. His comments raised eyebrows in Washington and prompted some members of Congress to question the wisdom of future aid to Russia.
And in September, then-Deputy Prime Minister Alexander N. Shokhin, who had begun negotiating new loans with the West, quit after a week on the job when Primakov reappointed a Chubais associate - Mikhail M. Zadornov - as finance minister.
"Not long ago, Anatoly Chubais' interview was discussed in which he came out frankly on how nicely we had conned the IMF, borrowed the money but were not going to fulfill the program,"
Shokhin said at the time. "I had thought that we needed to renew the face ... of the government, not to create the feeling that we are negotiating only to take the money and swindle our partners later."
Menem's announcement, delivered in a speech to ministers from 180 countries, electrified the 10-day talks because it undercut one of the biggest obstacles to an international strategy for fighting global warming - getting developing countries to participate.
The move was hailed a breakthrough by the Clinton administration, which is pressing developing countries to share more of the burden for protecting the Earth's climate.
"The planet is our home, and to preserve it is our responsibility," Menem said in declaring Argentina's intention to voluntarily adopt specific targets for restricting emissions from factories and automobiles over the next 13 years. Menem's plan puts Argentina on the same time frame as the United States and 34 other industrialized countries that agreed to sharply reduce pollution last year in Kyoto, Japan.
The announcement appeared to expose a widening rift among developing countries that had previously presented a united opposition to the notion of specific commitments on curbing the growth of emissions. Within hours of Argentina's announcement, the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan told U.S. diplomats it intended to announce a similar move yesterday.
"This is just the kind of commitment we needed to make the promise of Kyoto a reality," said Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, leader of the U.S. delegation to the climate talks. "This demonstrates that we have come a long way."
But the biggest polluters in the developing world, most notably China and India, remained opposed to any limits in the near future, opposition that continued to snarl the talks as they neared the scheduled conclusion on Friday. Negotiators are hoping by then to agree on a plan for deciding how to achieve and enforce the promises made in Kyoto.
The Kyoto accord commits industrial powers to reducing emissions by 2012 to levels at least 5 percent below where they were in 1990. But the agreement must be ratified by world parliaments to become law, and in the United States, congressional Republicans have vowed to defeat the treaty in its current form, in part because it would not require cuts by developing countries.
The Clinton administration says it will not submit the pact to the Senate until it wins commitments on "meaningful participation" by key developing countries.
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