President Obama and his crew have finally stopped pretending.
For eight years, Obama and his inner circles pretended to be the scourge of lobbyists. Obama touted a loophole-filled ban on lobbyist cash and an illusionary ban on lobbyist hiring, while striking a disingenuous populist pose. Meanwhile, his corporate lobbyist friends still got jobs from him, still cut him big checks, and still shaped his policies, all from behind thin veils of legalism, misdirection or even law-skirting.
But they’ve dropped the veil now.
Obama on March 30 endorsed a revolving-door drug lobbyist for U.S. Senate in the competitive Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. Also in March, longtime Obama confidant and K Street operative Tom Daschle finally made it official and registered as a lobbyist after ten years of apparently being a lobbyist.
Katie McGinty is running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, where first-term Republican Pat Toomey is vulnerable. Joe Sestak is a former three-star admiral who unseated a Republican congressman in 2006, and defeated incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter in the 2010 Senate primary, before losing to Toomey in 2010.
Sestak leads McGinty in recent polls — 33 percent to 17 percent in one poll, where McGinty was only barely in second place. A Franklin & Marshall poll shows Sestak expanding his 21-to-12 lead from February up to a 31-to-14 lead in Mid-March.
After those polls were released, Obama and Vice President Biden endorsed McGinty over Sestak. “[S]he knows what it means to work hard, struggle to make ends meet, and build a better life, one day at a time,” Biden said in his endorsement message.
In 2000, after chairing the Clinton White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, McGinty began lobbying the Clinton Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency. Her client: drugmaker Glaxo Wellcome. Glaxo made inhalers which used chlorofluorocarbons, and McGinty was lobbying the EPA on regulations controlling CFCs, her firm’s filings indicate.
The hop from chairing the CEQ to lobbying the EPA is standard fare in Washington, and it’s exactly the sort of thing candidate Obama campaigned against. McGinty has made her career out of this sort of thing.
After her stint on K Street, McGinty worked in Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, where she advanced millions of dollars of subsidies for green energy companies, including subsidiaries of the Spanish company Iberdrola. You can guess what she did once she left state government: McGinty got a paid gig on Iberdrola’s board, where she served until this election cycle.
Now Obama is trying to bring her back into public service. If he succeeds, who knows what sort of revolving-door riches await her after she leaves the Upper Chamber?
The Senate can be a very valuable experience for future lobbyists, as Obama’s bosom-buddy Tom Daschle can attest.
Daschle has been on K Street since he lost reelection in 2004. Daschle has also been one of Obama’s top advisers for the same period. In this, the final year of the Obama administration, Daschle has finally copped to being a lobbyist, officially registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
Aetna, the insurance giant, is retaining Daschle to lobby on Obamacare implementation. Aetna was a lobbying client of Alston & Bird in 2009, during the Obamacare debate, while Daschle was a “consultant” at the firm, but officially a non-lobbyist.
Obama was famously close to Daschle, having nominated him for a cabinet job. Daschle appears in the White House visitor logs on 30 occasions, including small meetings explicitly about health care. So Daschle worked for a lobbying firm and petitioned the administration, shaping its policies, but Daschle wouldn’t use the L word. “I guess I would call myself a resource,” Daschle told U.S. News.
Late in 2009, Daschle moved to another lobbying firm, DLA Piper to serve as “a senior policy adviser.” DLA Piper’s clients included drugmakers, energy companies, health-sector corporations and more. Daschle, again, never registered to lobby.
Last fall, Daschle launched his own firm, the Daschle Group. The Daschle Group is part of a larger K Street firm, Baker Donelson, through which Daschle has now registered as Aetna’s lobbyist.
Obama’s antagonism toward lobbyists was always a farce. In his final year, he’s dropped the act.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
