McCain And The Lobbyists, Part II -- Obama

So what really rankles McCain advisers is what they see as the Obama campaign's hypocrisy on the matter of lobbyist influence. They say that the Obama campaign makes a small concession -- forbidding federal lobbyists from contributing, which probably deprived Obama of less than one percent of his total money haul -- and continues to use lobbyists in ways that directly contravene the spirit of the concession.

Item: Many lobbyists advise the Obama campaign presumably on matters that they will continue to lobby about it Obama is president.

Item: Former lobbyists can contribute to Obama; they can bundle; can host fundraisers; plenty of state government lobbyists have contributed.

Item: Senior Obama campaign officials, like Steve Hilderband, worked as lobbyists before joining the Obama campaign. Hildebrand, ironically, lobbyied on behalf of the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. Many other officials lobbied on behalf of labor unions (field director Buffy Wicks) and corporations (Delegate counter extraordinaire Jeff Berman.)

Item: the McCain campaign's new conflicts policy is as strict as -- or more strict than -- the Obama campaign's.

The response of the Obama campaign, generally, is that while their attempts to avoid the lobbying influence nexus are not perfect, they represent a first step. Also, those former lobbyists on the campaign staff plied the trade for the forces of good in the world, and not the, well, forces of malevolence (like corporations and foreign governments) they associate with McCain's cadre of lobbyists. Supporters of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy might not have had a problem with Charlie Black's representing Marcos, or of Tom Loeffler's close relationships with the Saudis. (Interestingly, McCain and Obama both talk tough about Saudi Arabia.) Though one of Obama's advisers lobbies for the oil industry, Obama doesn't favor policies which coddle them.

On balance, it's fair to say that the former lobbyists who work for McCain are closer to him than those who work for Obama are in associational proximity to Obama, and that lobbying for foreign governments will always be more controversial for lobbyists of any political ilk, and that Democrats (and perhaps a chuck of the press corps' default mentality) don't have problems with union lobbyists (while Republicans, many of them, think that unions are fairly malevolent.) and don't equate those who lobby FOR environmental protection with those who lobby AGAINST it.
But the difference is NOT political bias. Truly. It's one of interest group politics versus client politics; corporate lobbyist's work tends to have a closer connection to the exchange of money and power than the work of interest group politics, and what benefits one corporation or industry tends to directly hurt another -- think of sugar subsidies; . No one suggests that those McCain advisers who lobbied on behalf of the pro-life movement ought to give up their position because McCain might appoint pro-life justices to the court.

The final issue seems to be one of optics. The Obama campaign has squeezed as much juice as possible out of their no-contributions-from-federal-lobbyist pledge, perhaps more juice than was there, and benefits from the media's general Progressive-era understanding of what a reformer is. There ought to be more scrutiny of Obama's ties to lobbyists.

The McCain campaign has a special burden because of McCain's own reformer brand and thus ought to have from the standpoint of politics been much more sensitive to the optical difficulties of stuffing your campaign with former lobbyists. And the fact -- and some McCain folks don't like this when it's pointed out to them -- but a great many people within their campaign and informal, outsiders advisers have been tuned to this channel for a long time, have raised these alarms, have predicted the scrutiny that would inevitably come, and now are throwing up their hands and saying, "See? I told you so."