Obamas Fundraising Tactics

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I recently spoke with a very successful registered Washington lobbyist, a Democrat who asked not to be named in this piece for fear of diminishing his influence with a possible Obama administration. Even though the Obama campaign wouldn’t accept a check from the lobbyist personally, he says, Obama aides asked him to help them raise money in other ways. “They wanted my list,” the lobbyist says, referring to the many donors the lobbyist has solicited for other campaigns. “Since then, they’ve asked if I could organize fundraisers but said that I couldn’t donate.”

Lobbyists have found other ways to work for the campaign, despite the official ban. In May, it emerged that Francisco Pavia, a registered Washington lobbyist whose clients include the Puerto Rican government, was helping to run Obama’s efforts in Puerto Rico. The campaign insisted that he was merely a volunteer and not on staff, and thus not in violation of the campaign’s own rules. While he was helping the campaign, Pavia took no leave from the firm of Winston & Strawn. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported at the end of July that 42 registered lobbyists had donated to Obama’s campaign despite the ban; only two had their checks returned. The campaign says that it’s doing the best it can to vet every contribution it receives against a database of registered lobbyists.

For all the hand-wringing over lobbyists, it’s worth noting that since there are few restrictions on donations to political conventions, the nominating conventions for both candidates were paid for by a slew of direct corporate donors, including AT&T, Qwest, and others. Bill Allison, a senior fellow with the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government, notes that the campaigns are “all running around lifting their skirts like there’s a mouse, saying ‘Eek, there’s a lobbyist!’ But they’re raising tons of money” from corporate interests.

Allison has more meaningful suggestions for curbing the influence of corporate money and lobbyists in both politics and government: Rewrite federal law to require lobbyists to disclose not only whom they lobby for and what issues they lobby on but also whom they’ve met with. Greater restrictions on what government officials can do in terms of lobbying after they leave public service also make more sense than phony gestures. And of course, free airtime from broadcasters who profit from the public airwaves would diminish the need of candidates to raise money and thus make lobbyists—who wield the promise of their clients’ cash—less influential.

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that lobbying is actually a constitutionally protected right. The Constitution is pretty plain in declaring that “Congress shall make no law…abridging…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” That’s lobbying. It’s one thing for a campaign to decide that it doesn’t want, say, pharmaceutical lobbyists writing its proposals on Medicare’s funding of prescription drugs, but it’s another to ban lobbyists from participation in a campaign entirely. After all, lobbyists represent not only corporations but also all sorts of other groups, from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to the American Legion.

Perhaps the weirdest moment in anti-lobbyist posturing came this year when Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, was disinvited from appearing with Obama at an Atlanta fundraiser. The reason? Cleland, a Vietnam War hero who lost three limbs while fighting in Southeast Asia, is a registered Washington lobbyist on behalf of Tissue Regeneration Technologies, a company that makes medical devices for wounded veterans and others. Cleland charitably says he was not offended by the disinvitation. But the rest of us should be.

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