Show 'Em Your Money!

Other Team 100 members weren't quite so generous, but they came through nonetheless: Howard Wilkens Jr. of Wichita, Kansas, who was made U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands under Bush, donated two grand, and Dallas investor Peter O'Donnell and real estate magnate Trammel Crow chipped in lesser amounts.

We can safely surmise that these honorable men don't have much interest in the placement of speed humps in Houston neighborhoods. They obviously just like the Mosbacher family, a lot, and they can't stop giving when the elder Mosbacher calls. According to a 1991 Los Angeles Times story, in his first two and a half years as Bush's commerce secretary, Mosbacher Senior took more than 30 trips, foreign and domestic, on the tab of American corporations and foreign governments. Among his stateside benefactors, the paper reported, were Donald Bren, Max Fisher, Chesley Pruet and Heinz Prechter.

For Mosbacher Senior and those in his rarefied social/political circles, buying elections is just a small part of the cost of doing business, of opening or protecting markets and maintaining corporate welfare. Not that either Mosbacher would personally benefit from the younger's election as mayor, other than satisfying the candidate's ego.

At least you'd think they wouldn't. But in one of the first speeches he gave after becoming a candidate, to the Houston Property Rights Association, Rob Mosbacher rattled off the goals he would pursue as mayor. The very first item he mentioned was his desire to help Houston-based companies supply power to emerging foreign markets -- which, as Mosbacher blithely noted, is the same sort of business that a subsidiary of the family-owned Mosbacher Energy Company has been pursuing for several years.

Perhaps there is nothing unseemly about using a public office to further interests so closely associated with one's own, and of course no one would assume that such an effort would be undertaken in the service of those who had helped underwrite a campaign.

But the temptation is great, and the perception of impropriety is very evident. People give, and some of them expect to receive -- even honorable men with summer homes and prep school educations.

They just don't get theirs in the men's room.