When Red Cavaney leaves his perch this week after 11 years as president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute to become the top Washington lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, he'll have more clout than the head of a D.C. corporate office could dream of having. Not only will Cavaney report directly to Conoco CEO James Mulva, he'll also have a seat on the company's elite management committee.
Meanwhile, back at API -- the industry's top lobbying arm -- there's been an intriguing change on the board. J. Larry Nichols, the CEO of Oklahoma-based Devon Energy, was tapped to be API chairman even though he is not an executive at one of the integrated oil majors.
-- Peter H. Stone
At Comcast's D.C. office, a well-known Republican is out as the top lobbyist.
"During this time of budget constraints and new challenges, we have decided to make some organizational changes to our government affairs group in Washington, D.C.," the company said in a statement. Specifically, Kerry Knott, the former chief of staff to then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, is out the door as senior vice president for government affairs. Melissa Maxfield, Comcast's vice president of federal government affairs and a former aide to then-Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, will assume responsibility for the executive branch of government and Kathy Zachem, vice president of regulatory and state legislative affairs, will oversee state regulatory and legislative affairs.
Going forward, Knott will be providing outside strategic counsel to Comcast and do outside consulting and lobbying for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. Meanwhile, Joe Waz, senior vice president of external affairs and public policy, will maintain overall responsibility for Comcast's public policy. A company spokeswoman said Knott was not available for an interview and "the spot will not be filled at this time."
-- Winter Casey
Wall Street is causing more pain in Washington. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is laying off a big chunk of its D.C. staff, a direct result of the economic woes and mergers on Wall Street, the New York-based group said. "Tough economic times require hard choices and this week SIFMA was required to restructure," the group said in a statement. "We are sorry to see the departure of so many of our hardworking and dedicated employees under these unfortunate circumstances."
A spokesman declined to say how many people would be getting pink slips, but news reports said up to one-third of the staff was being let go, including Christina Martin, who ran the group's communications team.
-- Bara Vaida
Davis Guggenheim (View image), the filmmaker who shot the footage for Barack Obama's 30-minute campaign commercial -- and who won an Oscar for directing Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth -- has a familial affinity for celebrating Democratic presidential candidates.
Guggenheim, 44, credits his late father, Washington-based biographical filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, for his first brush with the art of political ad-making: "My father woke me up in the middle of the night. I was five," he explained in an interview posted on the Academy Awards Web site. "`You want to come to work with me?'" We boarded a plane -- it was Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign -- he was doing a political film. Weeks later [Kennedy] was assassinated. And my father made the Academy Award-winning film, Robert F. Kennedy Remembered, from the footage he shot on the campaign. I was hooked forever."
-- Alexis Simendinger
AIG, the troubled insurance giant in which the government now has an 80 percent stake, donated $750,000 to help the Republicans fund their convention in St. Paul this summer. Freddie Mac, the government sponsored enterprise now in government receivership, gave $250,000 to the Democrats for their convention in Denver. The host committees of both parties have filed reports on their convention donors with the Federal Election Commission.
In total, the Denver host committee reported it raised $61 million, while the St. Paul host committee reported it raised $51 million.
-- Bara Vaida
One of the most important cabinet picks for the next president is arguably Treasury Secretary. If Barack Obama wins next Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee will have a big hand in determining who is confirmed for that job. A senior aide with the committee told me last week with certainty that committee senior staff think it will be Timothy Geithner, currently president of the New York Federal Reserve. Here's his bio.
Why Geithner? He is perceived to have been doing a good job in New York, knows the Wall Street players well, and is trusted and liked among Democrats. Geithner worked for both Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Larry Summers under President Clinton.
Other possibilities? My colleague Marc Ambinder wrote on his blog Tuesday that Obama might pick Citigroup Clinton-era Office of Management and Budget official Jacob "Jack" Lew for Treasury. Lew is currently COO of Citi Alternative Investments.
If McCain wins, John Thain, current CEO of Merrill Lynch has been mentioned as a possible candidate, according to Politico. Meg Whitman, former head of eBay and Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, may also be on the short list, the publication said.
Readers are you hearing any other names? Email me or comment.
-- Bara Vaida
Republican Frank Keating, the former two-term governor of Oklahoma and now president of the American Council of Life Insurers, has cultivated a bipartisan image in Washington. But the heat of the presidential campaign may have gotten to him. Keating recently made provocative comments on Dennis Miller's radio show about Barack Obama's past.
Keating, a co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, suggested Obama should be more forthcoming about his past drug use. "He ought to admit, 'You know, I've got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I'm back at the center,'" Keating said. The Huffington Post has the audio here.
With Obama ahead in the polls and the Democrats likely to expand their margins in the House and Senate, the question is: Will Democrats remember what Keating said? Could there be payback?
In a statement to National Journal, Keating responded: "Since joining ACLI in 2003 I've worked hard to position ACLI as a bipartisan organization. My surrogate work in the McCain campaign is unrelated to the life insurance industry business. It should serve neither to benefit nor detract from ACLI's important work on retirement and financial security issues."
-- Bara Vaida/ photo: Rick Bloom
The largest donors to the joint fundraising committees that John McCain and Barack Obama have used in tandem with their national and state party committees include individuals who work for Wall Street firms, legal powerhouses, high-tech companies and health-care interests. "Donors to these joint fundraising committees, or JFCs, are among the biggest fish in political fundraising" says the Center for Responsive Politics, which has new data on its Web site.
Three Democratic JFCs pulled in $183.7 million through September while ten Republican committees collected $176.7 million during the period, according to the center. Among the top givers to the GOP committees are people associated with JPMorgan Chase, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Morgan Stanley. The top Democratic givers are affiliated with, among others, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner and Citigroup.
The lion's share of the funds pulled in by the joint fundraising committees are allocated to the national party committees for ads and get out the vote efforts to benefit their presidential candidate and other candidates on their tickets.
-- Peter H. Stone
The latest lobbying fee numbers are in. The leader of the pack is law and lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The center analyzed nine months of data from the reports that firms file with Congress in which they disclosure their fee income from clients.
Akin Gump reported $25.1 million in lobbying fees during the first three quarters of 2008. No doubt the firm was propelled by a $1.66 million contract with private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts -- the largest on K Street, according to the center.
Patton Boggs came in at No. 2, reporting fees of $24 million, while Van Scoyoc
Associates was No. 3, posting fees of $18.8 million.
I looked back five years to the list of top 10 lobbying firms in October 2003. Five of the firms on the list at that time are on the list today: Akin Gump, Cassidy & Associates, Patton Boggs, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, and Van Scoyoc, proving these firms remain lobbying sector powerhouses. One shop that was big in 2003 has dropped off the list -- Greenberg Traurig, the firm where Jack Abramoff was employed.
-- Bara Vaida
(Read further for the top ten list)
There have been plenty of questions about how lobbyists would fare under an Obama administration. Here is an Obama campaign document on how the new administration would "curb influence of special interests."
Obama Management Agenda (09-08).pdfSo, how do lobbying professionals really feel about being kicked around on the campaign trail by Barack Obama and John McCain?
"It seems a little bit silly and arbitrary," said Dutko Worldwide Vice Chairman Gary Andres at a panel co-hosted by the Center for American Progress and American University. "I think the lobbyist argument... at its core is political," added Patrick Griffin of the firm Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart. AU political scientist and scholar on the lobbying industry James Thurber invited experts to opine on the candidates' rhetoric on lobby bans while also offering their own advice to the next president.
- Alexis Simendinger
There's a new player on the business community's team in its increasingly tough battle with organized labor. The Workforce Fairness Institute was recently set up as a 501(c)(6) group with a grassroots mission to work in more than 16 states against one of the unions' top legislative goals -- the Employee Free Choice Act.
The WFI is worried that the bill, which would allow a union to be formed in a workplace without a traditional secret ballot election, will gain considerable momentum next year if the Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. "We're out there educating the public on this issue," says Katie Packer, the executive director of WFI.
-- Peter H. Stone
The folks at Lobbyists.info released a study on how the new disclosure rules are affecting lobbyists one year after the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act became law. More than half have said they are spending much more time on record keeping. See the study here.
-- Bara Vaida
The amount of money spent on federal elections in the 2008 cycle is breaking records, say some new tabulations by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Counting contributions to federal candidates, political party committees, and federally focused 527 committees, spending on federal contests is likely to top $5.3 billion -- up 27 per cent from the 2004 election cycle, the Center says. White House aspirants broke the $1 billion mark -- almost double what they raised and spent in 2004, and triple the comparable sum for 2000. Leading the pack in PAC and employee contributions is the same industry sector that brought you the real-estate bubble and the credit crunch: finance, insurance and real estate. More on the Center's estimates here. To listen to a press conference call presentation by the Center's Executive Director Sheila Krumholz click here.
Photo: Liz Lynch
By Bara Vaida
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. says she will introduce legislation aimed at preventing financial firms receiving any portion of the $700 billion bailout from using that money to lobby. The move comes after Feinstein and Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., wrote a letter urging troubled insurance company AIG to halt its lobbying efforts, which it agreed to do.
I asked a Feinstein spokesman whether that means institutions that take the government help have to give up lobbying altogether until the money is paid back, or just cease lobbying on issues related to the bailout? "Details are still being worked out by our legislative staff," the spokesman said, adding that Feinstein wants to make sure that "taxpayer money isn't being used to lobby or [for] lavish trips or some of the other things we have seen." AIG executives were heavily critized for spending thousands of dollars on expensive corporate retreats even after the insurance giant had to be rescued by the government last month.
Good government groups have long complained about what they say is a huge gap in lobbying disclosure rules when it comes to grassroots lobbying. The law doesn't require grassroots lobbying to be disclosed and a recent AP report highlights where that lack of disclosure becomes a problem for taxpayers. The news organization reported that Freddie Mac hired DCI Group back in 2005 to help kill legislation that would have increased oversight of Freddie and Fannie Mae. The story says DCI Group, a well-known GOP-leaning grassroots firm, was paid several million dollars to target Senate Republicans and sway them not to vote for the legislation. The effort was successful in that the Senate, which was controlled by the GOP at the time, never took up the bill. Perhaps if that lobbying had been disclosed, some of those Republican senators might have thought twice about opposing the bill.
-- Bara Vaida
Chip maker Intel, which has kept a relatively low profile in Washington since it first opened its D.C. shop in 1986, is making moves to expand. On tap are plans to add 3 to 5 more lobbyists to its 17-person office and to expand it's PAC in preparation for the new Congress, says D. Bruce Sewell, senior vice president for corporate affairs. told a group of National Journal reporters this week.
"Getting things on the agenda will be challenge but its part of the rationale for expanding our presence ," Sewell, told a group of National Journal reporters.
Intel's wish list: Securing more federal funds for science and technology research; improved math and science education, expanding free trade, H1-B visas, patent reform, and participating in the development of a comprehensive national energy plan.
Intel's PAC has raised $299,367 in receipts this year and doled out $256,900 to federal candidates and committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
-- Bara Vaida
Avid Doonesbury readers have undoubtedly noticed that cartoonist Garry Trudeau has been making famous the names of lobbyists who work on John McCain's campaign, See the strip here.
-- Bara Vaida
