Mean Street, U.S.A.

David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.) has the same Indiana roots, fresh-scrubbed boyish looks, and conservative politics as his mentor, Dan Quayle, but he is as politically cunning as the former vice president was bumbling.

Although still a rookie, the 38-year-old McIntosh has been carefully groomed to be a political player. A veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, McIntosh has been shaped and underwritten for a specific purpose: to rewrite the nation's laws to suit small businesses and to promote corporate deregulation. In fact, some observers believe McIntosh has simply resurrected Quayle's anti-regulatory, industry-driven Council on Competitiveness, which McIntosh once headed, and moved it from the White House to the Capitol.

This incarnation could prove far more destructive than the original. For example, as the top deputy to Majority Whip Tom DeLay in his anti-regulatory crusade, McIntosh ran a "war room" during the House debate on a regulatory moratorium measure designed to undo or prohibit thousands of environmental, business, safety, and food and drug regulations.

In the war room, a small office near the House floor, lobbyists drafted provisions of the bill and crafted Republican responses to Democratic arguments. According to the Washington Post, one key lobbyist, Paul C. Smith, would write the rebuttals on his laptop and give them to a McIntosh aide, who then distributed them to Republican members.

From the moment he was elected, McIntosh has made direct connections between campaign contributions and official actions. On his first day in office, he introduced a bill promoting medical savings accounts, a measure worth tens of millions of dollars to Golden Rule Insurance, an Indiana company responsible for more than $1 million in contributions to the GOP in 1993 and '94 ($9,500 went straight to McIntosh). Since then, McIntosh has regularly invited other contributors to testify at congressional hearings and help write legislation.