Robert Gibbs, once the spokesman for the president of the United States, is now representing a different world leader: A yellow-suited clown with bright red hair.
McDonald’s Corp. announced it had hired Gibbs as its top media relations officer last week, news that was not well-received by President Obama’s liberal allies, who view the fast-food giant as a prime example of corporate greed. Labor unions in particular have targeted the chain by backing the various activist groups that protest it.
Gibbs’ hire is not an isolated case. Businesses or causes that the administration’s progressive allies are fighting have been able to recruit members of the president’s inner circle to join them as top-level advisers.
“When Fortune 100 companies hire former high-level White House officials as ‘strategists’, there’s no doubt what they’re looking to get for their investment,” said Chris Gates, president of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for open government.
Obama’s 2008 campaign director, David Plouffe, is now with Uber, the ride-sharing service being fought by the unions that represent taxi drivers, a move facilitated by 2012 campaign director David Messina. Ben LaBolt, Obama’s 2012 campaign spokesman, has advised education reform advocates opposed by teachers unions.
What the companies get from these hires is “influence and access,” Gates said, noting that Washington is built on relationships and connections. Somebody who recently worked in the current administration is particularly prized.
There’s little doubt that Gibbs’ hire was intended to counter the campaign that organized labor, led by the Service Employees International Union, has waged against McDonald’s. SEIU has pressured the company to unionize by underwriting activist groups such as Fast Food Forward and Fight for $15 that hold regular protests at restaurants to demand higher wages for workers. They have managed to tarnish its public image, which, with the nation’s recent focus on healthy eating and competition from “fast-casual” restaurants, has lowered overall sales.
McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook said in the announcement that Gibbs will play a “critical role” in the company’s “turnaround plan” to revive sales and restore luster to the brand.
He praised Gibbs as a “highly respected, talented [leader] who will bring a wealth of experience and outside perspective to McDonald’s as we build a more modern, progressive burger company.”
Of note is the use of the word “progressive.” Gibbs is meant to help sell the franchise’s message to liberals who tend to agree with the chain’s critics.
To liberal activists, it is proof that Gibbs was never really part of the liberal movement in the first place.
“He never aspired to be a progressive activist,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “There is a delicious irony. The man who couldn’t hide his contempt for activists now has to deal with the Fight for $15 [minimum wage] movement of fast-food workers.”
Another liberal activist leader, who requested anonymity, was even harsher.
“It’s no surprise that his next job will be shilling for a so-called ‘progressive burger company’ that’s spent decades crushing unions, paying poverty level wages and aiding the childhood obesity epidemic,” the source said.
Gibbs is hardly alone, though. Prior to joining McDonald’s, he founded the Incite Agency, a PR firm for Fortune 500 companies, with LaBolt in 2013. One of their first clients was the nonprofit Partnership for Educational Justice, whose advocacy of reforms including ending teacher tenure have earned the ire of teachers unions National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
In his announcement of Gibbs’ departure, LaBolt said, “We’re excited for Robert, and know that this is a natural extension of the work we’ve been performing at the Incite Agency.”
When Uber hired Plouffe last year, CEO Travis Kalanick said the man who ran 2008’s “Change” campaign would now be involved in “shepherding us well beyond the challenges of the Big Taxi cartel, and into the brave new world of software-powered transportation.”
One of the people who helped arrange Plouffe’s hire was Messina, who introduced Plouffe to Kalanick.
By “Big Taxi,” Kalanick was referring to the coalitions of tradition taxi services and the unions that represent them. They have fought Uber in city after city, trying to get state and local governments to pass regulations to prohibit the car service. In areas such as Nevada and Portland, Ore., it has briefly succeeded only to have lawmakers relent due to the service’s popularity.
Uber is locked in a battle in New York, for example, with traditional taxi services over whether the state legislature will allow it and the other ride-sharing service, Lyft, to operate outside of New York City.
Its main opponent is the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, an AFL-CIO affiliate. Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the alliance, has called the app-based dispatch services the “biggest threat to full-time work in this industry.”
She scorned the Plouffe hire, telling the Hill last year that their opposition “won’t be overridden by hiring a liberal to sell their neo-liberal brand.”
It is a bitter pill for allies of an administration that says it has “taken historic steps to close the ‘revolving door’ that carries special interest influence in and out of the government.” The “change” president hasn’t changed things much after all.
