Barbella
Senator
Sigh.....
"Washington Examiner columnist Timothy Carney notes that President Barack Obama's incoming Domestic Policy Council director, Cecilia Muñoz, is technically a registered lobbyist — despite repeated pledges by the Obama team not to hire lobbyists:
Obama took this same line after falsely claiming in the State of the Union address, "we've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs." He had, in fact, hired 50 such lobbyists. When confronted on this, Obama said, "For example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist, on the other hand, has more expertise than anybody in figuring out how kids don't get hooked on cigarettes. So there have been a couple of instances like that. ..."
It's not a totally unreasonable line: Obama was identifying corporate lobbyists, not nonprofit issue lobbyists, as the bad guys, so an anti-smoking lobbyists or a "immigrant rights," lobbyist is a different thing, even if he or she is registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
But if Obama makes that defense, he's having it both ways, because he regularly counts as non-lobbyists people who really are corporate lobbyists, but who simply didn't register as lobbyists. For instance, Google's vice president for global public policy and government affairs, Andrew McLaughlin, served in the White House working directly on policy affecting Google, but he hadn't been registered as a Google lobbyist.
Parsing the fine differences between lobbyist and nonlobbyist is hardly a distinction reserved to the Obama administration. Newt Gingrich's claim that he was a "historian" for two mortgage companies came under fire on the campaign trail. Muñoz was a registered lobbyist for National Council of La Raza, an immigrant rights nonprofit — and she was granted a waiver to serve in the Obama administration
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/the-lobbyist-slippery-slope-110516.html
"Washington Examiner columnist Timothy Carney notes that President Barack Obama's incoming Domestic Policy Council director, Cecilia Muñoz, is technically a registered lobbyist — despite repeated pledges by the Obama team not to hire lobbyists:
Obama took this same line after falsely claiming in the State of the Union address, "we've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs." He had, in fact, hired 50 such lobbyists. When confronted on this, Obama said, "For example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist, on the other hand, has more expertise than anybody in figuring out how kids don't get hooked on cigarettes. So there have been a couple of instances like that. ..."
It's not a totally unreasonable line: Obama was identifying corporate lobbyists, not nonprofit issue lobbyists, as the bad guys, so an anti-smoking lobbyists or a "immigrant rights," lobbyist is a different thing, even if he or she is registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
But if Obama makes that defense, he's having it both ways, because he regularly counts as non-lobbyists people who really are corporate lobbyists, but who simply didn't register as lobbyists. For instance, Google's vice president for global public policy and government affairs, Andrew McLaughlin, served in the White House working directly on policy affecting Google, but he hadn't been registered as a Google lobbyist.
Parsing the fine differences between lobbyist and nonlobbyist is hardly a distinction reserved to the Obama administration. Newt Gingrich's claim that he was a "historian" for two mortgage companies came under fire on the campaign trail. Muñoz was a registered lobbyist for National Council of La Raza, an immigrant rights nonprofit — and she was granted a waiver to serve in the Obama administration
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/the-lobbyist-slippery-slope-110516.html
