One of the best ways to see which way the political winds are blowing in the nation’s capital is to track who the big corporations are hiring to run their Washington lobbying operations.
Depending on which party controls the White House, Senate and House, politically attuned Fortune 500 operators frequently hire known Democrats or Republicans, usually former senators or representatives, as the case requires.
Being a former colleague of powerful committee chairmen, for example, can be a major leg up for a lobbyist representing an Exxon or GE.
So Google’s decision announced today to retain a highly visible former Republican House member to head its Washinton office ought to raise some eyebrows, especially as she is replacing a guy with solid Democratic credentials.
The obvious question to ask then is whether Google’s top decision-makers think President Obama will lose in November, or are they expecting Republicans to expand on their 2010 gains in the House and capture control of the Senate this year?
Former Rep. Susan Molinari of New York replaces Alan Davidson. As the Sunlight Foundation’s Lee Drutman points out, Molinari has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican congressional and other candidates since leaving the House in 1997.
Republican politics are very much a Molinari family business, as her father, Guy Molinari, was also a representative from New York, and her second (and current husband), Bill Paxon, is a former House member, also from New York.
Davidson, the guy on the way out at Google, was previously head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech oriented foundation, and was a contributor to Democrats. His contributions, however, totalled one tenth as much as Molinari’s, according to Drutman. He opened the Google Washington office in 2005.
She was an insider before, but this move likely makes Molinari a heavyweight to be reckoned with in official Washington. Here’s how Drutman describes the magnitude of the lobbying effort she will be heading:
“Molinari takes over a Google lobbying office that has become a major Washington player since it first came to town in 2005. In 2011, Google spent $11.4 million on lobbying (more than double its 2010 expenditure of $5.1 million), making it one of the leading corporate lobbying spenders. Molinari will head a staff of 12 full-time company lobbyists and manage 30 different Washington lobbying firms that Google has on retainer. Including full-time staff, 126 lobbyists were registered to represent Google in 2011. In 2011, Google filed 259 lobbying reports covering 22 different issue areas and 62 different pieces of legislation.
For more from Drutman, go here.
