Tisch's union busting did little to tarnish his long-time friendship with Al Gore. On November 7, the vice president sat in a suite he kept for himself at the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel in Nashville, dressed in flip-flops and jeans and watching the election results come in. Loews -- like every other hotel in Tennessee's capital -- is non-union.

Tisch used his friendship with Gore to become the hotel industry's point man in Washington, heading up a tourism trade group called the Travel Business Roundtable (TBR). "We have a recognition and credibility on Capitol Hill and, more important, with the administration," Tisch boasted to an industry trade journal last June.

His lobbying efforts yielded clear successes. President Clinton appointed a liaison to the travel industry -- the first such senior-level post -- and Congress formed a new caucus to focus exclusively on the industry's needs. The White House consulted Tisch and the TBR about several issues dear to hotel owners before they became law, including proposals for a minimum-wage hike, new federal welfare-to-work programs, and relaxed visa requirements for low-skilled workers. At the trade group's request, the Commerce Department included $400,000 for a statistical study of the travel and tourism industry in its 2001 budget. According to Hotel & Motel Management, the study will clearly demonstrate "the economic importance of travel and tourism to all sectors of the U.S. economy."

Tisch's own economic interests in government extend beyond his hotel chain. An heir to the billionaire Tisch family fortune, he is also a director of the Loews Corp, which his father and uncle co-chair. The corporation owns Loews Hotels, the embattled Lorillard Tobacco, insurance giant CNA Financial, and the Diamond Offshore Drilling Company, which has oil rigs in waters off Brazil, Indonesia, and the Ivory Coast. Lorillard and CNA give heavily to the Republican Party, supporting tort reform, an end to federal tobacco litigation, a relaxing of cleanup requirements at Superfund sites, and the gutting of Glass-Steagall, the law that once kept banks, insurance companies, and stockbrokers separate. From this flock of conservative interests, Jonathan Tisch has emerged as a Democratic black sheep of the family.

"We have many interests in the Loews Corporation," Tisch told reporters before the election, adding that he has "agreed to disagree" with his conservative relations. That many not prove too challenging: Now that the GOP controls the White House and both houses of Congress, those relations will help clear the way for the family business, just as Tisch has done for the past eight years.