Mark Block, whose face is now familiar to thousands as the Smoking Man in the Cain campaign’s latest video, told reporters that Cain was unaware of any settlements paid to the two women who made the accusations while Cain served as president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, as Politico reported. But the reasons for Block’s discomfort likely went beyond Cain’s situation to his own. Just hours before Politico burst forth with its explosive accusations, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel laid out a case that suggests significant illegal campaign activity on Cain’s behalf by a nonprofit organization, Prosperity USA (also known as America’s Prosperity Network), controlled by Block and linked to David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. As AlterNet has reported, Block, the former director of AFP’s Wisconsin chapter, has long been known for playing dirty in politics.

Pay to Play?

Prosperity USA, described as a 501(c)(3) in its incorporation documents (and which now seems to be defunct), appears to have been footing the bill for Cain campaign expenses, including a highly unusual payment of $100,000 to the right-wing Congress of Racial Equality in advance of a major speech by Cain. Daniel Bice, who writes the Journal Sentinel’s No Quarter blog, reports that the payment to CRE appears to have been disbursed from $150,000 in loans raised from unnamed donors. While Bice says that Cain was apparently not paid for that appearance, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer this month uncovered information suggesting that Cain’s speaking fees are not directly reported as such on his disclosure forms to the Federal Elections Commission, but are shielded from public view as transactions that take place between his private company and the speaker’s bureau representing him. Writes Mayer:

Yet, mysteriously, Cain discloses no payments from the Washington Speakers Bureau on his federal forms. Instead, on his 2011 F.E.C. form, he lists unspecified payments of between $50,000-$100,000 to his company, the New Voice, which he describes as a “public speaking” and “publishing” entity.

A Visit With Mr. Koch

Among Bice’s revelations is a record showing that Prosperity USA paid for Block’s travel to meet with David Koch, the billionaire right-wing funder behind Americans for Prosperity and its foundation, and AFP president Tim Phillips in Washington, D.C., in January — after Block was named “chief of staff” of the Cain campaign. Although the records Bice combed through do not specify a date for that trip, we know that both Phillips and Koch were in the nation’s capital to celebrate the swearing in of the new Congress on January 6, and to see the speaker’s gavel passed from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Koch and Phillips had much to celebrate that day, not only in the transfer of power from the Democrats to the Republicans in the House of Representatives, but also for the high number of Tea Party-allied freshmen lawmakers in the new class who owed their good political fortunes to Koch and Americans for Prosperity. They were particularly successful in Wisconsin, where they helped to elect two new congressmen, Sean Duffy and Reid Ribble, and managed to unseat longtime U.S. Sen. Russell Feingold with their ally, Ron Johnson.

Until he signed on as Herman Cain’s campaign manager in December, Block ran the Wisconsin state chapter of Americans for Prosperity. In addition to helping to send a handful of Koch-backed lawmakers to Washington, Block also helped elect Scott Walker to the governor’s mansion along with a cadre of right-wingers to the state Legislature, where they wasted no time in launching an assault against Wisconsin’s public employees and their unions. And it was Block who recruited Herman Cain to run for president.

Taxpayer Subsidy for Cain’s Private Jet?

Nonprofit organizations classified as 501(c)(3) under the IRS code are forbidden to engage in electioneering. Yet Prosperity USA lists on a rather messy statement of profit and loss, uncovered by Bice, that it is owed more than $40,000 from Friends of Herman Cain (the official name of the fundraising arm of Cain’s presidential campaign), including at least $16,000 for Cain’s travel on the charter jets of Hill Aircraft to appear at events sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, as well as an event in Chicago called RightNation, which the statement says Cain attended at the “request of AFP.” Hill Aircraft, on its Web site, offers this description of its services:

Our world class FBO facilities offer all the amenities for both passengers and pilots, including computer work stations with internet access, plasma TV screens for catching up on national and world events, pilots lounge with theatre seating and security camera monitors and state of the art flight planning facilities. Our line technicians are NATA Safety 1st trained and Hill Aircraft is a State of Georgia recognized drug free workplace. Our concierge services can take care of passenger and crew ground transportation, hotel reservations and catering, we can even arrange for sporting event tickets or a round of golf. Let Hill Aircraft show you why we have been named the #1 FBO in Georgia multiple times.

Payment for this campaign travel by a tax-exempt organization, which Prosperity USA claims to be, would amount to a taxpayer subsidy of plush accommodations for a political candidate. It appears, according to the Journal Sentinel, that Prosperity USA also forked over $3,700 for iPads used by the Cain campaign.

Koch-Linked Nonprofit Pays Singer of Cain Anthem

The records unearthed by the Journal Sentinel also note a payment of $1,500 to Krista Branch, who sings the Cain anthem, “I Am America” in the campaign’s videos. Bice also reports that Branch’s husband, who composed the song, works for the Cain campaign:

Branch’s husband, Michael, who wrote the song, has been paid $11,250 in his role as the Cain campaign’s Tennessee director and $7,360 as a fundraising consultant.

Prosperity USA also appears to have provided the funding for Prosperity 101, the Koch-linked workplace indoctrination program on which AlterNet (in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute) published an exposé last June. Our reporting showed Prosperity 101, which was fronted by Cain and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, to be a for-profit venture, with Linda Hansen, the Cain campaign’s current fundraiser, listed as its registered agent. Prosperity USA’s profit and loss statement shows $12,000 billed to the nonprofit by Hansen’s apparently for-profit workplace program, with a note saying that another $30,000 worth of bills from Prosperity 101 had just been submitted by Hansen for payment.

Over the course of our six-month investigation, AlterNet repeatedly sought comment from Hansen and Block regarding the nature of Prosperity 101, its corporate status and its relationship to Americans for Prosperity, but our calls and emails went unreturned. A spokesperson for Americans for Prosperity told us that Prosperity 101 was not a program of AFP, although an item on its Web site seemed to contradict that. On January 6, I approached Tim Phillips after an event in the Washington, D.C., metro area, and told him that neither Block nor Hansen would return my calls, despite the suggestion of AFP communications staff that I speak with them. “Maybe they just don’t want to talk to you,” he said.

Apparently, Mark Block doesn’t want to talk to the Journal Sentinel, either. He failed to return Bice’s calls, eventually sending the reporter an email on Friday night that read, according to Bice: “Will be able to respond to you, but need to schedule time to review questions. Obviously in the midst of a Presidential campaign I cannot drop everything.”

Above the Law

As a political operative, Block is known to be both hardworking and ruthless, often ignoring the law. As AlterNet reported, Block’s flouting of Wisconsin campaign law got him banned from participating in political campaigns there for three years. He also paid a $15,000 fine for the illegal use of an outside group in the campaign he managed for a judicial candidate. Practically the minute the ban was up, Block signed on to lead Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin chapter, and to help build the national organization.

In 2010, the liberal advocacy organization, One Wisconsin Now, uncovered Block’s role in a vote-caging scheme apparently designed to suppress the votes of college students and African Americans in Milwaukee. Block denied the accusation until the leader of a Tea Party group challenged him.

According to the experts Bice quoted in his investigative report on Prosperity USA, Block once again appears to have played fast and loose with the rules. From Bice’s report:

“If the records accurately reflect what occurred, this is way out of bounds,” said a Washington, D.C.-based election lawyer who advises many Republican candidates and conservative groups on campaign issues. The lawyer asked not to be identified because of those affiliations.

Can Cain Survive Without Block?

Should Mark Block be forced from Herman Cain’s campaign, it’s difficult to see how the campaign will carry on: the Herman Cain campaign essentially is Mark Block. There’s little in the way of campaign staff, and for ground organizing, the campaign appears to be dependent on the Americans for Prosperity network that Block, with Cain as his main rally-speaker, helped to build.

For months, corporate media ignored Cain’s deep connections to David Koch and Americans for Prosperity — connections that AlterNet has tracked since June. Today, at the National Press Club, Herman Cain appeared to survive the light grilling he received at the hands of NPC  president Mark Hamrick about the sexual harassment allegations. Cain said he had never sexually harassed anybody, that false accusations had been made against him, and that he was personally unaware of any settlement paid by the National Restaurant Association to women who had made complaints against him. “I hope it wasn’t for much,” he added, “because I didn’t do anything.”

Yet Hamrick’s introduction of Cain may have been more subtly damaging than his questioning of the candidate. In recounting Cain’s professional background, Hamrick noted that Cain has “worked at the Koch family-funded Americans for Prosperity,” an item not listed on Cain’s campaign résumé — but one now impossible to hide.

—-

H/t Sarah Posner for calling our attention to Bice’s report. You can read here Posner’s coverage of a Tea Party group’s gathering to plan the Milwaukee vote-caging scheme in which Block was later implicated.

During an October 1999 speech in support of the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which he co-sponsored with Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., Ashcroft said: “Tragically, the Missouri partial birth infanticide bill was vetoed despite its overwhelming passage by the bipartisan Missouri General Assembly.” This had followed a previous statement Ashcroft issued in April 1999, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, calling on Carnahan to “sign this important bill.” Later, during his failed campaign against the late Carnahan (whose widow, Jean, has taken his Senate seat after he was killed in a fatal air crash in October), Ashcroft launched a radio ad that attacked the governor, saying he had “vetoed a ban on partial-birth abortions.”

But what Ashcroft, President-elect Bush’s nominee for attorney general, didn’t mention was that the Infant’s Protection Act allows the use of force against abortion providers — perhaps even deadly force — to stop any illegal abortion. Moreover, the bill leaves unclear just what constitutes an illegal abortion.

Even the bill’s author, Louis DeFeo of the Missouri Catholic Conference, initially agreed that the bill allowed deadly force against abortion providers, saying, “I think that’s justifiable in protecting a person.” (The bill effectively defines a fetus as a person.)

As Carnahan put it in his veto statement at the time: “Perhaps most outrageously of all, this bill will allow someone to legally commit acts of violence, including a lethal act against a physician, nurse or patient, in order to prevent a termination of a pregnancy by a procedure which the attacker reasonably believes would be a violation of this bill.”

Moreover, Carnahan wrote, the bill was drawn in such a way as to “ban some of the safest and most commonplace first- and second-trimester abortion procedures.”

Carnahan’s veto was overridden by the Legislature in an effort led by a member of his own party. And Ashcroft immediately began lauding the veto override at Carnahan’s expense. “It is an incredible accomplishment,” Ashcroft told his fellow senators. “It represents only the seventh veto override in Missouri history, the third override this century, the first override since 1980.” (Translation: Ashcroft suffered no overrides during his two terms as Missouri’s chief executive.)

A day after the override, Planned Parenthood of Missouri went to a federal court and won an injunction against enforcement of the law, arguing that it criminalized most common abortion procedures. The injunction remains in effect as Planned Parenthood’s legal challenge to the law continues.

“Of all of the different versions of these bills, [the Infant's Protection Act] was the most egregious assault on reproductive rights of any of them — even going so far as giving a defense to those who might engage in violence,” says Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). “It was an extraordinary bill. And Ashcroft supported it fully.”

Now, as Ashcroft tries to assure his critics that his own partisan political views won’t inappropriately influence the job of the nation’s top law enforcer, the question emerges: Did Ashcroft, a staunch abortion opponent, condone the potentially extreme ramifications of the bill? Ashcroft, like other Cabinet nominees, is not taking questions from the media, and the Bush transition office did not respond to requests for a comment. Supporters of the bill claim it offers no protection for potential abortion-doctor killers. But opponents dispute that.

At first glance, the Infant’s Protection Act simply appears to be a particularly punitive version of a conventional “partial-birth” abortion ban, one in which a doctor who performs the procedure and the woman who engages the doctor to perform it could be charged with infanticide, or second-degree murder of a “living infant.” But the “living infant” described in Missouri law could be a first-trimester fetus. In the Infant’s Protection Act, a “living infant” is defined as “a human child, born or partially born.” Prior case law sets the precedent for the use of the word “person” to include “unborn child or children,” cited in one statute to mean “the offspring of human beings from the moment of conception until birth at every stage of biological development.”

The act also gives new meaning to the terms “born” and “partially born.” According to the bill, the “infant” — embryo, fetus or actual baby — can be “partially born” even while inside a woman’s body, so long as the head has cleared the cervix. This could, potentially, include abortion procedures used at all stages in a woman’s pregnancy.

Though the bill makes an exception for “legal abortions,” the law itself does not spell out what those might be, and it appears to simultaneously outlaw most procedures previously deemed legal.

But the most confounding statement of the Infant’s Protection Act is one that may seem to be the most innocuous: “Nothing in this section shall be interpreted to exclude the defenses otherwise available to any person under the law including defenses provided pursuant to chapters 562 and 563, RSMo.”

That first chapter cited a criminal defense for a person who has used force against another under conditions of duress “because he was coerced to do so, by the use of, or threatened imminent use of, unlawful physical force upon him or a third person.” The key phrase here is “third person,” which under Missouri law could be construed to apply to a fetus. Likewise, the other statute cited allows a person to use physical force — even deadly force — if “he reasonably believes that such deadly force is necessary to protect himself or another against death.”

Sam Lee, director of Campaign Life Missouri, who helped DeFeo write the bill, contends that the inclusion of these statutes in the Infant’s Protection Act is actually intended to shield doctors, allowing them to perform an illegal abortion (in this case, employing “deadly force” against the fetus) if it is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman (in this case, the “third person.”) Reproductive rights advocates ridicule this claim, pointing out that the Infant’s Protection Act already exempts physicians from criminal liability if the procedure is performed “to save the life of the mother during pregnancy or birth.”

For his part, DeFeo acknowledges that these particular statutes were included to allow for the use of force against medical personnel to stop an illegal procedure, but he claims that the law only bans late-term, dilation-and-extraction abortions. In a televised debate with Carnahan a week before the veto session, DeFeo asserted that the statutes demand that any defense used to stop a banned procedure “must not exceed the bounds of what’s necessary in order to stop the action,” according to a report in the Jefferson City News Tribune.

Exactly what constitutes “what’s necessary”? DeFeo, a lawyer, went on to give examples of acceptable use of force to stop a doctor from performing a proscribed abortion: “pinning his arms to his side or knocking him to the floor.” However, backing away from his earlier statement, DeFeo contended, “In no way would anyone be able to use deadly force as a lawful defense.”

Ironically, Carnahan was prepared to sign a “partial-birth” abortion bill. In his veto statement on the Infant’s Protection Act, Carnahan wrote, “I have said repeatedly that I would sign a bill banning ‘partial birth’ abortions (assuming it included an exception to safeguard the mother’s health). Unfortunately, the legislature chose not to send me such a bill.” He went on to carefully lay out his objections, ending with the bill’s final section, the provision for “defense of others.”

Despite Carnahan’s oft-repeated promise to sign a more narrowly drawn “partial-birth” abortion ban, Ashcroft used Carnahan’s veto of the Infant’s Protection Act to tar the governor throughout the Senate campaign. In one of his direct-mail fundraising letters, sent to potential donors in November 1999, Ashcroft wrote, “My opponent, Mel Carnahan, is one of America’s leading advocates of partial birth abortion.”

By March 2000, Ashcroft had refined his message in a later direct-mail missive: “Mel Carnahan has been a leading figure fighting to keep the barbaric partial birth abortion procedure legal, while I’ve been a leading sponsor of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban in the U.S. Senate.”

In the summer months leading up to the election, Ashcroft was airing radio spots that took Carnahan to task for commuting the death sentence of a triple-murderer at the behest of the pope, comparing the commutation to Carnahan’s veto of the infant protection act. “The pope opposes partial-birth abortion,” says a woman in the spot.

“But Carnahan refused to show mercy for innocent life,” an angry male voice replies.

The ad goes on to note the largesse bestowed on Carnahan’s campaign by reproductive rights groups, calling the governor “the top recipient in the nation of money from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League.”

“Innocent victims suffer,” says the woman.

“But to Mel Carnahan,” the man chimes in, “it’s all politics.”

On the law’s provision for the defense of the fetus by deadly force, Ashcroft had little, if anything, to say. (This reporter’s search came up empty.) Yet it would be hard for him to deny familiarity with the text of the one-and-a-half page bill. In his October 1999 speech, he notes that the language of his own Senate Partial Birth Abortion Ban differs from that of the Missouri law. As the former attorney general of the Show-Me State, one would assume that he understood the references to the “general liability” and “defense of others” sections of the criminal code.

Though Missouri’s Infant’s Protection Act remains under injunction by U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright, last month state Judge Robert H. Dierker Jr. of the St. Louis Circuit took on the interpretation of the law at the request of the federal court. It took Dierker 54 pages to conclude that the law prohibited only late-term partial-birth abortions, and that the law would not allow for lethal force against abortion providers. Privately, reproductive rights advocates refer to his opinion as “a mess”; publicly, some, like Paula Gianino, president of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, prefer to term it “an interim opinion,” and plan on waiting for clarification.

The case is now back at the federal appeals court, and Planned Parenthood has filed a motion to amend Dierker’s judgment. Should this law or another like it make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, says Michelman, it would be up to Ashcroft, should he be confirmed, not only to enforce it but to interpret the court’s decision for other government agencies.

Within moments, Dina Merrill, the actress and heiress who sits on the RPCC board, emerged from the building, evicted on account of the yellow T-shirt she flaunted under her trim, unbuttoned purple blazer. No yellow T-shirts in the hall, she had been told. Merrill had entered the building with Susan Cullman, the group’s co-chairwoman, and fellow board member Jennifer Blei Stockman, who had both declined to mar the understated palette of their tailored suits with the offending garment. They made it as far as the lobby before being turned around. When a police officer told them to move across the street, the pro-choicers politely moved on, with no choice words conferred upon the cop.

But the group is committed to their cause. Even though the anti-abortion language did not change in the new kinder, gentler GOP platform, members of the group remain committed to getting that language out of the platform next week, even if that means a fight on the floor of the convention.

But members of this group are clearly not your garden-variety political activists. They range in age from their 20s to 70. They wear pearls and Ferragamos; I even saw one with a pastel cashmere sweater tied across the shoulders of her crisp, black suit. There are a handful of men enlisted in this cause: some six or seven guys under the age of 30, and three notable grown-ups — Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the Nebraska abortion provider who took his challenge to his state’s so-called partial birth abortion ban to the Supreme Court (the high court ruled in his favor); attorney Glenn Murray, who represented abortion provider Dr. Bernard Slepian until the doctor was felled by an assassin’s bullet; and Randy Moody, a platform delegate and national co-chair of Planned Parenthood Republicans for Choice. Among the 30 or so volunteers who have come to do battle on the platform, only two — a beefy fellow with gelled, stand-up hair, and a slim ingenue in a short, slit skirt — have made discernable fashion statements.

Many of the women smoke, though generally not in public settings (unlike the on-duty cop I saw this morning on a corner-minding beat), and I’ve yet to hear any of them claim to be vegetarians. The only things pierced in this crowd are ears, one hole in each lobe, thank you very much.

But don’t mistake their tame demeanor for lack of passion. After years of being shunted to the margins of their own party, they’ve learned a thing or two about organization and have marshaled their resources for the single-minded purpose of pulling the GOP’s anti-abortion plank out of the party platform. Theirs are the faces of 21st-century American feminism: poised, genteel and determined. Of course, the ladies themselves may shy from the “f” word for fear of its connotation of stridency. These are Republicans, after all — old-style Republicans, the kind we used to have before the women-haters and gay-bashers seized control of the party of Lincoln, the kind of Republicans who loathe government intrusion in people’s personal lives as passionately as they do its interference in the marketplace.

Merrill, for one, finds the right’s success in seizing the party “upsetting,” and has few kind words for former President George Bush, a classic country club Republican whom she sees as having helped the right achieve its aims. “His voting record in Congress was pro-choice,” she explains, “and his wife is a member of Planned Parenthood.” For Bush to have moved over to the anti-abortion side for the sake of political expediency, she says, “doesn’t play with me.” In her 70s, Merrill, who starred in “Desk Set” and “Butterfield 8,” is still a well-appointed beauty, her perfect, champagne-blond pageboy swept behind a black hairband.

“People ought to stand up for what they believe in,” she says, emphatically. “If you have a strong belief and a passion, you don’t sell out. And he sold out, in my humble opinion.”

Though Merrill is one of the group’s well-heeled and notable members, her story is not unlike others in the group. Born to a rock-ribbed Republican family, she was raised with the values of civic involvement and attachment to good causes that typically engaged many of her class. She has long supported Planned Parenthood as one of its celebrity advocates, but she never considered herself to be terribly political until she saw Susan Cullman in action at the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego. In 1996, Cullman’s organization, then called the Republican Coalition for Choice, nearly pulled off a floor fight over the platform.

“For the first time, we have a real grass-roots movement coming together on this issue,” says Cullman. “That’s what we want to build.”

While liberals may scoff at the notion of a grass-roots movement of the bourgeoisie led by the privileged, they’d be wise not to. For the future of abortion rights, and civil rights in general, lies less with the Democrats than it does with the Republicans — simply because the Republican Party, as currently constituted, poses a grave threat to both, and Republicans have been known to win the presidency, and countless other offices, from time to time. And that’s one reason, these women will tell you, that they stick with the party — but not the only one.

“I’m a Republican because I believe in less government in all aspects of my life,” explains Cullman. “I also believe in a strong defense, I believe in less regulation, I believe in less taxes — these are the issues that make me a Republican. And to have the pro-life position determine whether or not you’re a Republican will make us a very small party in the end.”

At first blush, Cullman herself is an unlikely activist. She came to Washington in 1981, the wife of a well-off Reagan appointee, whom she has since divorced. A Washington wife with a penchant for good works, she ran Call For Action, a national nonprofit that provides a help line to the public that steers callers to appropriate agencies and organizations that provide assistance on a host of problems. She was a volunteer for the President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives. Though she never agreed with Reagan’s anti-choice views, she didn’t perceive a real threat to reproductive rights at the time, taking comfort in the notion of abortion as a constitutionally protected right as decided by the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide.

But times changed, as did Cullman’s personal life. The influence of the right grew ever stronger, not only in the GOP but throughout the country, as anti-abortion judges grew in number at all levels of government. Cullman divorced and began contemplating the landscape that confronted her only child, a girl. In 1991, motivated by a 1989 Supreme Court decision (Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services) which gave states the right to restrict abortion, she brought the focus and organizational skills honed during her years of volunteer work to the Republican Coalition for Choice, a group she founded with like-minded party activists.

A slim, coltish woman of 50, Cullman wears her neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair in a straight line a few inches past her shoulders, and favors finely fitted pants suits and minimal makeup. A polite indignance simmers in her piercing gaze, which radiates purpose and competence. Among the volunteers staffing RPCC phones (including the mother-and-daughter team of Gretchen and Scarlett Johnson of the Johnson & Johnson family), Cullman inspires an impressive level of loyalty. Many among the ranks have told me that they’re here because of her. One young woman scurried to Philadelphia from New Jersey after reading a commentary by Cullman that appears in this month’s copy of Glamour magazine. Even Merrill has manned the phones, calling 31 Republican governors to marshal their support for changing the platform.

Cullman spends much of her days here in Philadelphia in a smoke-filled room, plotting strategy with Lynn Grefe, the RPCC’s national director, and several board members. She periodically appears to address her troops in the two large salons at the Hilton that the group uses as its convention headquarters.

Call the wisecracking Lynn Grefe the perfect foil to Cullman’s cool, composed disposition. Small and slender with expressive brown eyes, Grefe just can’t help herself from talking in sound bites. Seeking to avoid an off-putting message, it was Grefe who arrived at the group’s slogan, “Warning! GOP Pothole Ahead!” that appears across the backs of the yellow T-shirts. “We truly believe that this abortion language is a pothole on any road to unity for this party.” Grefe explains, “and we are asking that it be taken out.”

A hyperactive New Yorker, and mother to two kids who were school age when she adopted them, Grefe represents another face common to this group: regular, middle-class people, several of whom have worked in the social service field. Long before she found a life in politics, Grefe worked in a halfway house for delinquent girls run by the woman who is now the group’s animated administrator, Susie Walrich. Both found their way to New York, where Grefe began consulting to corporations and Walrich found employment in the New York State Division of Child and Family Services. Walrich, who shares with her husband a nearly full-time interest in auto racing (together they command a Nissan 500 tube-frame car designed for road racing), came on board to work for Grefe in the RPCC’s New York offices earlier this year after leaving her 25-year career with the State of New York.

When she and her colleagues are accused of disloyalty to their party, a nearly everpresent smile suddenly disappears from Grefe’s face. “You know what’s interesting?” she asks. “The platform has been bad, as far as we’re concerned, for 20 years, and we’re still here. We’re still Republicans. The other side, they say ‘change one word of that platform or you pick a pro-choice VP, and we’re out of here.’ I don’t think they’re Republicans.” At a press conference earlier this week, Grefe offered to buy a bus ticket for any pro-lifer who cares to bolt the party over a change in the platform language.

Platform deliberations are expected to continue until 6 p.m. on Saturday, when Platform Committee chairman Tommy Thompson, the pro-life Wisconsin governor, has promised to settle all issues with a strike of his gavel. Should the talks not go their way (as of late Friday, discussions appeared to have closed on the topic), the coalition continues to hold open the possibility of seeing the issue raised on the convention floor next Monday, when convention delegates will be asked to ratify the platform. “We’re willing to go as far as it needs to go,” says Cullman.

This morning I joined members of the coalition for breakfast at the Marriott, the dining spot most often used by platform delegates before they resume their places in the convention center. Seated nearby was Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., the notoriously anti-abortion congressman who chaired the platform committee in ’96, and who today sits on the subcommittee that will take up the issue of the abortion plank. I asked him to assess the coalition’s chances of winning the plank’s removal. “I have no idea,” said Hyde. But what would it mean for the party, I asked, if the issue were to be raised on the convention floor on Monday?

“It would mean that democracy is in full force,” Hyde replied.

For Cullman and the rest of the coalition, Bush’s decision to tap Cheney served as the disappointing end to a running mate search after he publicly elevated a number of pro-choice candidates, including Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and New York Gov. George Pataki.

“[Cheney] even voted for a bill that would have defined a fetus as a person from the moment of conception!” said Lynn Grefe, the group’s national director, from one corner of the pink couch she shared with Cullman.

“From conception!” Cullman exclaimed. “That’s not even a fetus. Isn’t that a zygote?”

“What I want to know,” asked Mary Wright, a local Republican activist, “is, if a fetus is a person, can it own property?” Laughter erupted from the group of 12 or so people who crowded the room. From there, the list of potential fetal rights grew to the absurd as the group grew giddy, while Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the plaintiff in the case involving a Nebraska partial-birth abortion law which went to the U.S. Supreme Court last month, tried to suppress a smile.

Camped in Philadelphia as the GOP begins deliberations over its party platform, Cullman, Grefe and their comrades have come to town to lobby delegates to the platform committee in the hope of removing the party’s abortion plank, which calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban all abortion without exception. Though they’d prefer that their party simply take no position on abortion, they’d be happy to settle for a plank that stated the party’s respect for a range of positions, including pro-life and pro-choice. But even that seems a quixotic quest, since Bush appears poised to placate the party’s right wing by leaving the abortion language unchanged.

Quixotic or not, says Grefe, Bush’s choice of Cheney has invigorated her group for doing battle on the platform.

“Up until breakfast this morning, I thought it was all a creative ploy by the Bush campaign to divert attention while Bush considered others,” said Miranda Hooker, the 23-year-old state coordinator of the group’s Massachusetts chapter. “Now I see they’re just not that creative.”

While it’s unlikely that the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition can win its point in the platform hearings, the leadership of the Republican Party has begun to acknowledge that it can no longer shut out the pro-choice wing of the party. “They’ve been killing us with kindness,” says Grefe. “This is very different than last time. Four years ago, I felt like a leper.” Indeed, Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, chair of the platform committee, made a point of meeting with Grefe and Cullman two weeks ago, and Grefe refers to Thompson as “a great guy.”

As the result of a merger between Cullman’s Republican Coalition for Choice in Washington and Grefe’s Republican Pro-Choice Alliance of New York, the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition has raised $1 million so far this year, which she says will be used to spread the pro-choice gospel within the GOP.

It’s not just the group’s newfound fundraising prowess that sets Republican leaders on edge; there’s also Cullman’s reputation as a strategist. At the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Cullman came close to pulling off a floor fight over the platform language on abortion, which would have made for a messy scene on national television.

In order to bring an issue to the convention floor, six state delegations must band together to move on it. In ’96, Cullman had four delegations firmly in her camp — Maine, Massachusetts, California and Wyoming. Prior to the convention, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who led her state’s delegation, had made noises that seemed to indicate her willingness to jump into the fray. Smoke signals from Albany at the time indicated that, as went Whitman, so would go Gov. Pataki of New York.

But at the last minute, Whitman pulled back. Though she denied forbidding her delegates to join in the fight, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Keane told a different story. When I interviewed him on the convention floor during Jack Kemp’s acceptance speech, Keane told me that the Jersey delegation had folded “because of the governor’s leadership.”

But Grefe is hoping to bring the fight to the floor of the convention this year. With a pro-life ticket, she says, “the platform offers the party its last chance” to show that it cares about the rights of women.

Under the tutelage of Harry Belafonte, Makeba pleaded the case of her people to audiences across America during the height of this nation’s civil rights struggle. In 1962, she performed at President Kennedy’s famous birthday party in Madison Square Garden (also on the bill that night: Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday”). By 1967, she had a top-selling song on the Billboard singles charts; today that infectious dance tune, “Pata Pata,” has found new life in commercials, and has been re-recorded for her new CD.

In 1968, after two previous marriages (one to trumpet legend Hugh Masekela), Makeba married controversial black activist Stokely Carmichael and lost her spot as toast of the town. She was merely toast. Her gigs were canceled and her career in the United States tanked until the strife in South Africa captured the American imagination during the 1980s. By then, her marriage to Carmichael, who died in 1998 of prostate cancer, was over, and she had lost her only child, her daughter Bongi, to complications of the daughter’s delivery of a stillborn baby.

After 30 years in exile, Makeba returned to South Africa at the close of 1990, and she makes her home there today. Last month, Putamayo World Music released “Homeland,” her first new recording in six years. It’s a mix of strong, captivating African-language pieces, and a few English-language songs in the American pop vein.

At 68, Makeba’s voice has grown even richer and more commanding — qualities tempered by a crackliness that has come with age. This is particularly apparent on the remake of “Pata Pata,” a duet with her sweet-voiced granddaughter, Zenzi Lee. (Makeba’s grandson, Nelson Lee, also appears on “Homeland.”) In the spoken bits of the song, Makeba exudes a sort of bemused world-weariness, an attitude that carries into our conversation when I ask her about her decision to re-record the song.

“I didn’t decide that,” she insists. It was the idea of her producer, Cedric Samson, she says.

“I said, ‘No, man — ‘Pata Pata’ since 1956!’” (Makeba first recorded the song in South Africa 11 years before it made the charts in the U.S.)

Samson convinced her to do it “just for fun,” she explains, so they recorded it live in the studio in a couple of takes. The beat has been slowed down to hip-hop standards, the drums are synthesized and the background vocals have acquired a bluesy bend.

Makeba has always rejected the label of political singer or political activist, countering the claim with the assertion that she merely conveys the truth. “Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can’t do anything about that.”

“And your marriage to Carmichael was not, as many claimed, a political statement?”

“How can anybody say that? In this country, for instance, there are people, couples [where] one is Republican and one is Democrat. But no one looks at that as anything. I never seconded any of Stokely’s statements. I mean, he went out there and made his own statements, and he believed in what he believed in. And I can say he died believing in that. He never changed.”

The pain of what happened to her career in the wake of that marriage is still apparently raw; she still seems shocked that her then-husband’s advocacy of taking up arms against the white man should have had any bearing on her own fortunes, especially since she never commented on U.S. domestic politics. And she is right; it was unjust. But her surprise at the image-conscious music industry’s response to her marriage seems startlingly naive, given the convulsions over race experienced throughout American society during the 1960s, not to mention the subordinate role expected of wives to husbands at that time.

“Did you get to see Carmichael before he died?” I ask.

“He came to South Africa and I saw him there,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He came to the unveiling of Steve Biko’s tombstone … And he came to my home [in Johannesburg], but I wasn’t there. And so I went to see him where he was staying because I knew he had been reported ill. I just wanted to go and see him. And I remember that he was leaving to go to the Cape where the unveiling was going to take place. Actually I found him packing … He came down and said hello.”

Letta M’boulu, a singer whose career Makeba promoted in the 1960s, was there with her husband, she says. Whatever emotion she felt at the meeting is not for me to know. It is presented as little more than pleasantries exchanged between acquaintances.

“Then I was invited to come here to Washington when he was honored by all the black important people just before he went to Guinea to die,” she says. “But I couldn’t come. I had been engaged to go perform, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

Big things happen in Makeba’s life while she is on the road, and she is rarely able to cancel a gig, she says, since bad management at the height of her career left her dependent on performances for her income. She receives little money from her recordings, and none, she contends, from the hits she made in the 1960s.

Of all the intrigue and legend of Makeba’s life, perhaps the most consistent theme of her work is the idea of home. After 30 years away, three decades lived as a citizen of the world, how comfortable does she find the South Africa of today? The title of a cut on the advance copy of the “Homeland” CD grabs my attention: “Unhome.” It turns out to be a misprint. When I raise it with Makeba, she corrects me: “UM-home,” she says.

The song is a searing lament in Xhosa, Makeba’s native tongue. The words seem secondary to the cry of desolation conveyed by the singer. I ask her what the lyric means.

It is, she explains, the story of a young woman, newly married in the traditional manner. When it is time for her to go to live with her husband’s family, she is escorted to his home, as is customary, by a young woman from her village, who her new husband falls for.

There’s a knock at the door. I instinctively get up to answer it; it’s the room service waiter with a silver coffee service, which he places on the cocktail table before us, as I move a blood-pressure monitor out of the way. Makeba is not one who has made it this long by dint of good health. She’s had bouts with cancer and, early in her career, survived a gruesome car accident in South Africa. After happening upon the wreck, a white policeman had left Makeba and members of the act, Township Jazz, with which she was performing at the time on the road to die. Three of her fellow troupers did.

Makeba returns to her narrative about the bride in her song.

“Now she’s thinking of the dowry the parents had paid, you know, there are a lot of difficulties,” she explains. “You can’t go back home. You’ll be an embarrassment, so what do you do? So she goes outside and sits on a rock and she says, ‘I have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. This feeling, I cannot explain. And I cannot go back home.’”

There’s an obvious resonance there for Makeba, but not only in the idea of exile. Her first marriage, the one of which her daughter was born, was to a black South African policeman, whom Makeba caught in flagrante with her sister.

The song as it appears on the CD is Makeba’s own interpretation of it, she says, “but it’s an old song I learned from my grandmother. She used to sing this and explain it. I used to wonder if she didn’t go through this because she sang it very well, with so much feeling. And she would look that sad.”

But back to that question of home, I say. Is she really at home in today’s South Africa?

“Well, it’s still the same place, where I left my umbilical cord,” she contends. “In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home. Because when I left home [in 1959] I had no intentions of not going back.”

She cites “Masakhane,” the new CD’s opening cut, a rousing number, beautifully composed by Zamo Mbutho, one of the musicians in her band. Written with a Xhosa lyric, the title is a word coined by activists to describe an idealized spirit of nation-building. “This young man knows,” she says of Mbutho. “He’s with me all the time because we work together, we travel. And he knows how happy I am to be back home. There’s a part where it says [she sings]: ‘Sengi buyele mna singibuyile khaya Kwasi kwamnand, ekhaya we vumanibo He mn.’ It means: I’m back! I am back home! And it’s so wonderful; it is so great to be back home. So let’s all get up!”

“A lot of things have changed” in South Africa, she continues. “We’re now able to go to places we were never allowed to go to. Look at black and white children, all those races, going to the same schools, and so on. And here are some beautiful things that have happened. But it’s just still now the poverty and the homelessness that we have to work hard on now. So the struggle goes on.”

“How do you keep the struggle your own,” I ask, “without succumbing to the demands of Western powers whose development money holds the key to developing resources?”

“But the resources, the natural resources,” she says, “they all belong to that very troubled continent of Africa. And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources. For instance, we’re always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from — with what? The very resources we need to keep there.”

It’s time, she says, for the people of Africa to “stop fighting and just be soldiers, beautiful soldiers, who should fight, not against each other or other nations, but fight disease, fight hunger, fight all the ills of the world and bring our people up to a much better way of living. I just wish that that should happen, and it must happen someday. Otherwise, I will look up to the Superior Being and say, ‘What is it that we have done?’ I mean, it cannot go on forever; it should not go on forever.”

She notes the West’s late response to the March floods in Mozambique. “Flood, flood, flood all over; I was never so sad,” she says. “And I cried when I saw that woman have a baby on a tree. I mean, really. And it was so strange that there is little South Africa can do; we were hit in [northern South Africa] by the flood. And our country was struggling there and then also had to go and help in Mozambique with the limited means we have. And the world did not come through until 10, 12 days later. That was the strangest thing, too, and it hurt. It hurt those of us who do love our troubled continent. And you ask yourself the question, why?”

Of the prospect for racial harmony in her own country, Makeba remains cautiously optimistic, though she concedes that legal change alone will not do the trick.

“When you have the laws that people can go to and say, ‘You can’t do this to me because the law says you cannot do it,’ — that was the difference between America and South Africa, even when I first came here.” Racism, she explains, “was not institutionalized anymore” — at least not in the northern states — “but, you know, people practiced it. Which goes to show you, you can make all the laws you want, but you cannot change people’s ways. If you must change them, you have to understand that it will take a long time.

“We have a chance maybe now in that all those little ones are going to the same schools together, and maybe they will grow up not feeling [bad toward] each other, not suspecting one another, because they’re growing up together. . . And so we have a chance, maybe 50 years from now, to be much better. I don’t think it will be gone. Some people are just die-hards; they will not change, and there are quite a few of those on both sides.”

“Do you think you might write another book?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says with a sigh.

“Your last one came out in 1988, and a lot of things have happened to you since then.”

“It was not well distributed,” she says of her autobiography, “Makeba: My Story.” “Perhaps it was the wrong time, because there were still a lot of people who thought I was a terrorist or I am this, I am that.”

“Do you still get that?”

“Well, there are so many things that have happened to me that make me feel that some people will never forgive.”

“Forgive what?”

“I don’t know, because I’ve never killed anybody. I’ve never said anything nasty about anybody, except my truth, which is things I’ve experienced in my country, or wherever … I feel sorry for people who cannot forgive, because there are people who think I did something,” she asserts. “But even if I did something, has it not been so long ago that they can’t say, ‘Oh yeah, you know, maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was this.’ If they don’t, it’s them I feel sorry for, because I have forgiven everybody who tried to strangle me and couldn’t — I’m still here.”

There’s a certain irony to Makeba’s circumstance. Because she was categorized as an anti-apartheid activist, with apartheid now over, she herself is starting over as a singer. I mention this, and she laughs.

“I always fall, then get up and — ” she suddenly claps her hands. “My life has been like a yo-yo. One minute I’m dining with presidents and emperors; the next I’m hitchhiking. I’ve accepted it. I say, ‘Hey, maybe that’s the way it was written, and it has to be.’ And that maybe there’s a reason why I’m still here.”

“I hope nobody puts me on a shelf again,” she says plaintively. “I hope all those people can find it in the goodness of their hearts to just please leave me alone.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who do you mean?”

“All the ones who’ve been suppressing and whatever, you know?”

I don’t. “Who don’t give the music the airplay?”

“Who don’t forget.”

“Oh, those people,” I reply, cluelessly. “Well, who do you mean when you say this?”

“They know themselves,” she says, stubbornly. “When they read this, they’ll know who they are.”

We’ve moved into serious resentment territory. “There is a sad thing, too …,” she continues. “When I left [South Africa] and went to Europe … the manager I had then had me sign so many things. And you would be surprised — I have never had one cent from ‘Pata Pata.’ I should be a millionaire,” she says.

“But, you see, that is the sad story of Makeba. People keep beating me on the head with a hammer.” Her voice tamps down to a whisper. “And I keep getting up.”