One might expect some adjustments along the chief corridor of federal lobbying based on this week’s results.

It’s just coincidence that I’m reading now Matthew Continetti‘s book, The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (Doubleday, 2006), as the GOP licks its wounds from Tuesday’s elections.

We might never know what role corruption played in the stew of factors that hurt congressional Republicans at the polls. Shady deals certainly competed for supremacy with the war, the Foley scandal, earmarks, fiscal fiascos, and the historical trends against the party of the president serving his sixth year.

But Continetti certainly makes the case for the importance of the corruption element, lifting a few rocks to examine the underside of the current arrangements on and near Capitol Hill.

For example, he examines the notion Republican leaders had that they should cultivate a GOP lobbying “constituency.”

And so the GOP has come to adopt the theory of interest group politics, which dictates that politicians should seek to please the specific interests that brought them to power, and not promote national goals that affect diverse groups. This is a good theory to have if you are a machine politician — punish your enemies; reward your friends — and it’s definitely enough intellectual backbone to prop up Tom DeLay’s K Street Project. But it is bad for the Republican Party. It’s bad because it makes it seem as though the GOP is nothing more than a grab bag of favoritism and greed, and it’s bad because no political party should become too beholden to the interest groups that populate it.

Consider the fate of the party that the Republicans defeated [in 1994].

The Democrats have suffered loss after electoral losse [until this week] because they have jettisoned any sense of national purpose, or greater good, or overarching ideology in favor of the needs of narrow special interests — civil rights groups, feminists, and organized labor. … Republicans, in a remarkably short span of time, have become similarly beholden to corporate cash. It is not that difficult to see a moment when they, too, will reap the whirlwind.