Lobbying - more Obama 'change we can believe in'?

Ahh, the "perceptions" game. Team Obama moves meetings with lobbyists away from the White House itself.

But, in reality, a change which is no change is no change.

And, confidentiality agreements? Sounds like all of Team Obama has a collective thin skin.

Mod Max Baucus strangles health ins public option

Mod Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee Gang of Six have put the finishing touches on gutting the public option on health insurance. And, if you expect a federal government alternatingly lead by neolib Dems and yahoo GOPers to actually regulate health insurance companies tightly enough to save us all money, I have some palm trees in Baucus' Montana to sell you, complete with lobbyist funding to buy them.

Beyond no public option, here’s what else is missing:
• Details of how the government will more tightly regulate health insurers, when the federal government doesn’t even have an office for that right now, and only the semi-toothless Federal Trade Commission to oversee advertising claims.
• Any plan to address fee-for-service doctor payments, which almost everybody agrees is a significant part of the problem.
• Guarantees that big insurers won’t be able to “game” the health-insurance coops that are being proposed as a VERY poor person’s substitute for the public option.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Team Obama continues its sellout to Big Pharma.

So relax, folks. You are going to get screwed; the astroturfers could have saved their Tea Party money; the lobbyist money worked just fine by itself.

Lobbying makes strange bedfellows on healthcare

How else can you explain former GOP and Democratic House Majority Leaders, Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt, both doing healthcare reform lobbying for the same New Jersey healthcare company?

It also makes for a slower slog through the Senate, and that’s part of what these lobbyists count on.

The Gephardt involvement shows that, once again, the Democratic Party is often just a whiter shade of pale.

Dicking around on healthcare

What else can you say about former GOP and Democratic House Majority Leaders, Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt, both doing healthcare reform lobbying for the same New Jersey healthcare company? Other than, I’m waiting for Armey to go lobbying at Barney Frank’s door.

DC is still DC

At least on Lobbyist Gulch, K Street.

What else can you say, vis-a-vis the duopoly, when a top GOP lobby shop buys out a major Democratic firm purely for access?

A century-old reality check for progressives

Way back in 1908, Arthur Fisher Bentley was arguing Progressives needed to apply Realpolitik to politics.

Now, in the linked New Yorker story, Nicholas Lemann argues today’s progressive theoreticians such as Thomas Frank need to re-read Bentley and apply his ideas to today.

First, Bentley’s bona fides. A Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, then taken not into academia, but Chicago journalism. As for politics, he worked on Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party presidential run.

Second, a thumbnail sketch, to whet your appetite.

Bentley says there is no “public interest,” just the interest of different, well, interest groups within the public interest.

Lobbying groups serve these interests; reach for your wallet when they claim to serve the “public interest.”

There’s two forms of political groups — lobbying-type groups and talking-type groups. The CFR, let alone many other folks, wasn’t around a century ago, but it seems clear this is the type of folks Bentley meant.

Third, contra Frank in “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” Lemann says that Bentley, were he alive today, would say that Kansas social conservatives believe they have a perceived interest in pulling the GOP lever. Maybe not all of them have thought about the financial side of voting for a GOP that also includes Grover Norquist. Maybe, in many cases, they have, and have determined the fiscal GOP isn’t that big a deal, or that maybe they’ll get lucky and get their extra slice of financial pie soon, or that, on idealistic grounds, they actually agree with Norquist as well as wanting to criminalize abortion.

Lemann also ties this to how McCain, and perhaps especially Obama, now seem to be disappointing followers, but I think he’s weak here.

Personally, I wouldn’t have any problem if Obama were in medias politicas res more when it’s time to compromise. But, when you don’t actually stake out that many positions in the first place, content to be an empty vessel or a mirrored blank slate, then, when you do stake out principles, it’s what progressives might accept after the work of compromise is done, whereas there’s been no negotiation to a compromise on Obama’s part, it’s a point Lemann misses.

That aside, I think it’s also a great insight on why post-World War II third parties in America have never gained traction. Today’s Greens and Libertarians are too idealistic to muck it up. The Reform Party, as founded, had no interest group, just an interest person, Ross Perot. And, its failure, between Perot’s two runs, let alone afterward, to define itself led to its essential demise.

McCain’s latest lobbyist problem

This time, it’s on the foreign policy side. Randy Scheunemann gets paid well to advocated for independent countries from the former Soviet Union to try to join NATO. It happens to dovetail nicely with Schmuck Talk Express’™ desire to boot Russia from the G-8, so on he stays, at least for now.

Meanwhile, McCain’s policy toward Russia is more radical than anything Obama has proposed, and he pays a known neocon to be his chief flack.

McCain has lost aides with lobbyist ties …

As often as Bush has captured the “al-Qaeda No. 3 operative” in Afghanistan. Schmuck Talk Express™ has had to let a campaign majordomo go because of lobbying connections time after time in recent weeks.

This time, it’s campaign finance co-chair Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler who gets the ax.

Beyond Schmuck Talk’s lies about not being connected to lobbyists, we also get the picture of a campaign in less than stellar organization.

Tom Loeffler has his own lobbying firm with his name on it.

Now we know why Schmuck Talk wasn’t incensed about Boeing losing an Air Force contract to Airbus last month, either:

Among Loeffler’s clients is the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., the parent company of plane manufacturer Airbus.

And, I guess Saudi Arabia wasn’t as dictatorial as Myanmar:

Newsweek reported over the weekend that Loeffler's firm was paid $15 million by Saudi Arabia.

This is the fifth person let go in the last month:

McCain advisers Doug Goodyear, who was to run the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., and Doug Davenport, a regional campaign director for the Mid-Atlantic states, also resigned this month. Both worked for DCI Group, a consulting firm hired to improve the image of Myanmar’s military junta.

When the policy was announced last week, McCain fired energy policy adviser Eric Burgeson, who represents energy companies as a lobbyist.

The campaign also asked Craig Shirley to resign from McCain’s Virginia leadership team because he was behind an independent group that has been criticizing Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama on the Internet.

At the same time, other Schmuck Talk advisors are following the letter, but not the spirit, of Big Mac’s “what, me meet with lobbyists?” line by taking leaves of absence from their DC head shops.