Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, November 15, 2008 2:08:42 PM
To put the old song on its ear, everything new is old again. Remember when Barack Obama said this?
To rousing applause, Barack Obama formally announced
this afternoon that the Democratic National Committee will follow his
lead and begin refusing donations from registered lobbyists and
special-interest political action committees.
“They do not fund my campaign,” the presumptive Democratic nominee
told a small-town southwest Virginia crowd, after delivering a standard
refrain that blames drug and insurance interests for blocking universal
health care. “They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out
the voices of the American people when I’m President of the United
States.”
They may not have funded his campaign, although that’s highly questionable, but the Washington Post reports that they’ll be running his government.
Obama has tapped a number of lobbyists for high-profile positions in
the transition team, and most of them will likely end up with
significant leadership roles in the coming Obama administration:
Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change
Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he
encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.
But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama’s
fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered
lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for
the nation’s trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug
companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor
unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress.
Mark Gitenstein, one of the 12 transition board members who will
play a significant role in shaping the Obama administration, worked on
million-dollar lobbying contracts with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
promoted legislation for giant defense contractors Boeing and General
Dynamics. Until this fall, he was registered to petition Congress and
the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of AT&T, Merrill
Lynch, KPMG, Ernst & Young and others.
Gitenstein has blue-chip credentials for the volunteer role on the
Obama team. He was chief Democratic counsel for the Senate Judiciary
Committee during confirmation hearings for controversial Supreme Court
nominee Robert H. Bork; was a close adviser to Vice President-elect
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s White House bid; and served as counsel to the
Senate Intelligence Committee.
Hey, nothing says post-partisan culture change than hiring the
lobbyist that engineered the shameful attacks on Robert Bork!
Gitenstein isn’t alone, either. Matthew Mosk notes the other
significant lobbyists now rising to power under President Hope N.
Change:
- Ron Klain - Joe Biden’s chief of staff, had lobbied for Fannie Mae
on “regulatory matters” until 2004, when the fraud got uncovered after
years of Congressional interference with regulators. Klain also
lobbied for companies defending asbestos lawsuits and for ImClone, the
drugmaker that faced charges of fraud.
- John Podesta - The man running Obama’s transition spent the last
few years lobbying for the far-Left group Center for American Progress.
- Patrick Gaspard - Lobbied on health care issues on behalf of the SEIU, now associate personnel director for the transition team
Podesta has an even more interesting tie to lobbying. Bill Clinton
enacted a five-year ban on former White House staffers lobbying present
and future administrations in order to curtail influence peddling.
However, after George Bush won in 2000, Clinton rescinded the order to
help his staffers get jobs in the wake of the Republican sweep to
victory. The man who helped write the revocation? John Podesta.
There is nothing inherently wrong with lobbying. There is plenty
wrong with hypocrisy, especially on the grand scale committed by Barack
Obama during this campaign. He regularly indulged in the populist
demonization of lobbyists and claimed to lead a new movement to purify
Washington of their eeeeevil influences. Now that he has the
power, Obama has no problem working with lobbyists for fraudulently run
mortgage giants and drug makers, smear artists, and asbestos-lawsuit
defenders.
That’s change that 63 million suckers believed in.