Dem consultants getting rich off of corporate payola

[LiviaOlivia]

The West Wing Characters Become Lobbyists
by Matt Stoller
Sun Jul 30, 2006 at 02:22:32 PM EST


~snip~

....Carter Eskew's lobby shop The Glover Park Group...(passed) around memos arguing Democrats shouldn't take on the Medicare prescription drug fiasco because of bad polling. Their corporate clients are of course various players in the health care industry. Here are the opening few sentences of the memo.

After a thorough review of early public polling on the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, our analysis suggests that support for the program is solid. Five months into the program, enrolled seniors are satisfied with the program, found enrollment to be easy and think it's saving them money.

Here's the full memo, in case you're curious. Carter Eskew was the chief strategist for the Gore campaign in 2000, and his colleagues at the Glover Park group include Joel Johnson, a top Clinton White House advisor on communications and policy, Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton's spokesman from 1998-2000, and Howard Wolfson, a key Hillary Clinton advisor. If you're looking for a more accessible sense of who these people are, it's the senior team type characters from the West Wing. They all went into lobbying after the Clinton show was canceled. This is a HUGE problem. The people who know how to run campaigns are not politicians, they are the people who run campaigns. The fact that this class of operative/consultant is working for corporate interests and not for Democratic gain means that there is little to no infrastructure that can effectively push for legislative and political victories. That infrastructure is too busy getting rich off of corporate payola. Had this infrastructure been focusing on winning for Democrats, we'd have a campaign ready to go based on the donut hole. It's not like we didn't know this was coming.

This machine is incredibly powerful, but it's vulnerable, and that's why DC is freaking out about the Lieberman challenge. How does this machine tie directly into Connecticut? Well, Carter Eskew is Lieberman's ad man.

It doesn't stop there, of course. The corporate Democratic machine extends far into the structure of how camapigns operate. For instance, we have senior Kerry and Dukakis advisor Michael Whouley, who is apparently building a $3 million model on how to win in the battleground states in 2008 in preparation for Yet Another Insider Presidential Losing Campaign. Whouley runs Dewey Square, a premier lobby and PR shop whose clients include the Chamber of Commerce and corporate health care interests. Dewey Square employed three separate 2004 Demoratic campaign managers; the campaign manager for Edwards, Gephardt, and Lieberman all did time at Dewey Square. It's also worth pointing out that diversity doesn't seem to be a, well, primary goal of this group.

All of these lobbyists/PR people (including Steve Elmendorf) have telecom companies as their clients, and are working against net neutrality. If you want to know why the Democratic party has a muddled message, look no further than the conflicts of interest in trying to run a populist campaign when your other clients have a direct financial interest in not seeing a campaign like that succeed.

http://mydd.com/story/2006/7/30/142232/789

[soothsayer]

1. i'm convinced that congress and the presidency should be just

like jury duty---draft slugs in there, who don't want to be there, for short stints (a few months?), pay them almost nothing, make sure they don't receive any payments afterwards, and let them actually work on honest (not convoluted, porky) legislation that makes sense. There must be some way to wean congress from the corporate teat.

On edit, no rich people allowed, either.

[Totally Committed]

2. Yet another reason for the DLC foothold in this Party....

And it explains why all our consultants are such pure and utter SH*T... and why they need to be purged completely from the electoral process.

TC

[Greyhound]

3. You know we can fix the vast majority of our political woes with 4 words

Bar All Private Money, period.

Of course that ain't gonna happen, here come the howls... :hide:

[LiviaOlivia]

4. Well here we go. The Dem corporatists "Atlas Project"

washingtonpost.com
Atlas Group Strives to Map Out Success for Democrats
By Chris Cillizza and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Sunday, July 30, 2006; A05

Three of the Democratic Party's top field organizers have formed a group to provide their party's 2008 presidential nominee with road maps to victory in the dozen or so battleground states. The effort is known as the Atlas Project and is being organized by political operatives Steve Rosenthal, Michael Whouley(mentioned in the OP) and Mary Beth Cahill. The group will analyze election data, interview local Democrats, and mount a polling and targeting effort to devise a comprehensive strategy to win votes in these states.

In 2004, Rosenthal headed America Coming Together, a liberal advocacy group that built large turnout operations in battleground states, while Cahill managed and Whouley served as the senior adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). After the election, the three went into consulting, and now they have reunited to oversee what Rosenthal describes as "a more thorough targeting analysis than has ever been done before."

The project, with an estimated cost of $3 million, will have four stages. This fall, the three founders, as well as a few full-time staffers, will begin studying election results from the past two presidential races in the 12 to 14 states likely to provide the margin of victory for the next president. The group will then travel to the battleground states to interview elected officials, campaign operatives and key activists to learn about winning in these critical states.

The third leg of the project will be a broad polling and targeting operation. Three prominent polling firms -- Garin Hart Yang Research Group, Penn Schoen & Berland and Brilliant Corners -- will conduct the surveys, while Copernicus Analytics will analyze demographic data so political messages can be crafted to reach very small constituencies. Finally, the group will draft memos focused on the individual states and based on everything they have learned. The group hopes to finish the road maps by January 2008.

~snip~

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/29/AR2006072900602.html