Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur

From The Outside To The Inside

by West Virginia Rebel

For a guy who campaigned as an outsider, some of those who work for him are awfully in:

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.

And just how much Change will be in store for these guys? Perhaps not as much as Obama promised:

Obama’s formal policy during the campaign indicated that there may be some role for lobbyists in his administration, though his rhetoric did not always convey that. In a 2007 speech, he said he was “running to tell the lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over. They have not funded my campaign. They won’t work in my White House.”

A few days later, he changed the phrasing to say that lobbyists “are not going to dominate my White House.”

Among the first acts of Obama’s transition effort was the release of a formal policy on lobbyists, which Podesta described as “the strictest and most far-reaching . . . of any transition in history.”

The rules ban lobbyists from donating to the transition effort and lobbying during the transition period. Once Obama is sworn in, his advisers must wait a year before attempting to lobby the administration on any transition issues they handled.

The code also says that “if someone has lobbied in the last 12 months, they are prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied.”

That one could be tricky for at least two transition team members. Gitenstein lobbied Congress on a broad spectrum of subjects such as “legal reform” during the past year, according to disclosure reports. As a senior advisory board member, his work could touch on a range of topics that would pose problems for him.

Another senior staff member, Patrick Gaspard, recently de-registered as a lobbyist on health-care issues for the Service Employees International Union. He is the transition team’s associate personnel director.

Candidates love to talk about how they’ll end the influence of lobbyists. Once they get elected, however, they can’t seem to get away from them, including the One.

Comments

Posted by on 11/15/08 at 05:11 PM from

Buyers remorse?

Posted by HARLEY on 11/15/08 at 09:59 PM from

Change, change, has anybody got change?

Posted by on 11/16/08 at 03:49 PM from

Just another example of what fucking con man this clown is.

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