A Campaign of Lobbyists
Posted by Michael Link on February 22, 2008 at 10:55 AM
There isn't any other way to describe it, really, reading the latest Washington Post piece detailing why McCain team is shockingly tied to Washington lobbyists. And should he become the next president of the United States, then we've got something else on our hands...
A White House of lobbyists.
Consider, via the WaPo piece:
His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.
[...]
McCain recently hired Mark Buse to be his Senate chief of staff. Buse led the Commerce Committee staff in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was until last fall a lobbyist for ML Strategies, representing eBay, Goldman Sachs Group, Cablevision, Tenneco and Novartis Pharmaceuticals.McCain's top fundraising official is former congressman Tom Loeffler (R-Tex.), who heads a lobbying law firm called the Loeffler Group. He has counseled the Saudis as well as Southwest Airlines, AT&T, Toyota and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
It's really a huge list, and you should read the whole thing. But if you read nothing else, you've got to check out this sentence about his chief political advisor, mentioned in the article as chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses.
Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus.
McCain talks a good game about lobbyists going back and forth between public officials and lobbyists. But I didn't know buses had revolving doors.
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