Republicans in 2010 have an opportunity to capitalize politically on popular anger with elites in Washington and Wall Street and with an exploding government that tramples on the little guy in service of the well-connected. But now, in a competitive Senate race, Republicans have tapped a corporate lobbyist who has grown wealthy inside the Beltway by begging for government favors on behalf of the biggest banks, drug companies, automakers, and other leeches in the Washington swamp.
Former Sen. Dan Coats wants to pass through the revolving door again, leaving his plush job at a K Street lobbying firm to challenge two-term Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., for the Senate seat Coats held for a decade before he cashed out.
Democrats have been quick to attack Coats as a lobbyist who has done the bidding of the fattest fat cats. But, ironically, the policies Coats advanced on behalf of his corporate clients are the same bailouts, regulations, and overspending that President Obama has championed in the name of “change.” And Coats’ biggest clients — Google and the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America — have been intimate Obama allies.
Coats represented Bank of America in the third quarter of 2008, when the collapsing bank begged for and received tens of billions of bailout dollars — a bailout that was passed with Obama’s blessing and that enflamed the populist anger that led to the tea-party rebellion of 2009.
For Coats, that was just the beginning. Acting on behalf of Cerberus Capital Management, the hedge fund that owned Chrysler, he lobbied to expand the Wall Street bailout to Detroit, according to the October 2008 lobbying report filed by Coats’ employer, King & Spalding. Presidents Bush and Obama agreed with Coats and Cerberus, and taxpayers soon bailed out Chrysler.
Coats also was on the side of domestic manufacturers who convinced Obama this year to impose tariffs on steel tubing from China. Coats represented the Ad Hoc Coalition for Fair Pipe Imports from China, the group of steel-pipe manufacturers who sued Chinese pipe manufacturers in the World Trade Organization. In January, that group struck gold when Obama announced tariffs on steel pipe from China — consumers and other manufacturers lost with Obama’s big-government action, while labor unions and Coats’ clients won.
Another Coats client was billionaire private-equity mogul Julian Robertson. But Coats wasn’t lobbying on the taxation of private equity managers or regulation of the finance industry. He was lobbying for the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill that would restrict energy use in the name of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
Robertson was invested in Chinese biofuels and in nuclear power, both of which would benefit from a cap-and-trade scheme, such as the one included in Lieberman-Warner and in the current Waxman-Markey climate bill, that would constrain the use of fossil fuels like coal.
Coats’ other clients include a lineup of subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons, many of which spent 2009 at President Obama’s side, fighting for the Democrats’ “reform” agenda. For instance, Google is one of the president’s closest allies — Fortune magazine, for instance, carried a story last October headlined “Obama & Google (A Love Story),” with the thesis, “In Google, the $22-billion-a-year online-advertising Goliath, Obama appears to have found a corporate kindred spirit.” Google is also a Coats client. Lobbying filings show Coats has lobbied on Google’s behalf for “Openness and competition in the online services market,” which presumably means he worked for Google’s coveted “net neutrality” regulation — effectively price controls on networks, to the benefit of Google and other content giants.
Democrats have attacked Coats for representing drug makers Amgen and the Medicines Company as well as PhRMA, the biggest spender of all single-industry lobby groups over the past decade. But it’s the GOP and its conservative base that should be upset about this dossier — PhRMA was an early and enthusiastic backer of Obama’s health care “reform,” which would have profited the industry. And MDCO’s priority for which they hired Coats — a tailor-made five-year extension of MDCO’s monopoly on one drug, Angiomax — was slipped into the final reform bill by Democrats just before Scott Brown’s election torpedoed it.
Populist anger is burning over bailouts, overspending, government growth, and the closed-door Washington collusion between the wealthy and the powerful. This anger has Democrats worried. But if Republicans nominate Coats, a Beltway insider specializing in corporate welfare, the Tea Party might be tarring and feathering the GOP as well.
Timothy P. Carney, The Examiner’s lobbying editor, can be reached at [email protected]. He writes an op-ed column that appears on Friday
