Mitt Romney aptly explained why what Newt Gingrich did for drug companies and Freddie Mac fits — at least broadly — into the sphere of lobbying.
Newt’s Freddie Mac contract did not specify what sort of consulting Freddie was hiring him for, but the telling detail, as Romney pointed out, was that Newt reported to the company’s VP for public policy, a registered lobbyist.
Regarding Medicare, Romney pointed out that Newt was swaying GOP votes in favor of expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs. When Gingrich said he was acting as a public citizen, Romney brought up a relevant fact: health-care companies that stood to benefit from the legislation were paying him at the time.
I’ve written about the word-parsing before. It breaks down like this:
Newt was probably not legally a lobbyist, but he was a lobbyist in the common understanding of the word. And when Gingrich says he never did “lobbying,” a ton of evidence shows that that’s false both by the legal and common understanding of the word.
Here was my column: Gingrich was a lobbyist plain and simple. And my blog post going a bit deeper into the legal details.
