You can watch Hillary being spoon-fed questions about this by her scribe in Time Magazine, Mark Halperin, here, as they share cackles that Jim Demers (of Concord, NH) is a lobbyist.
But here's the picture you want to see:
(Data and graph are from OpenSecrets.org).
As Hillary's "inevitability" is shown to be a paper-thin facade and she tanks in the polls, she and her political operatives* -- a small camp of nasty, manipulative, gutter, attack-style henchmen -- have lashed into Senator Obama because a few of his honorary (volunteer) co-chairs at the state-level are lobbyists. *yawn*
Bring. It. On. Let's have this comparison.
Let's compare how much Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of venal corporate interests, versus Barack Obama, shall we? Read on...
Let's see, on Hillary's side, her entire national campaign is headed up by Mark Penn.
"Bill and Hillary Clinton have put enormous faith in Penn, and given him veto power, aides say, over every word that goes into her television ads and every line in her mailers. "He had her and the President's trust very deeply," says one adviser who is close to the campaign. Adds another: "He's a one-man shop."
Penn has worked for Hillary Clinton "for over six years, since he ran the polling and messaging for her election to the US Senate in 2000."
Of the hundreds of powerful, national lobbyists in bed with the Clintons, let's look at the #1 man running her campaign.
Who is Mark Penn, and who are his clients? He is CEO of Burson-Marsteller (B-M), and his own polling company, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB). The aptly-acronymed B-M is the world's worst offender of public relations spin, defending the most irresponsible corporations for their most offensive behavior. This includes the tobacco industry, big oil, nuclear power, and mercenary firms like Blackwater. (Yes, after the 16 September 2007 massacre in which Blackwater mercenaries killed 17 innocent civilians in Baghdad, Burson-Marsteller was hired to improve Blackwater's image.)
In the interest of time, let's focus on just one of Mark Penn's clients: the tobacco industry and his ties to them. Forgive the lengthy quotes, but I can't do any better than the ever-useful Bob Burton (and Rampton and Stauber) at PRwatch.org, who wrote the following expose of Penn and Clinton:
"For decades, Mark Penn and his opinion polling company have advised the tobacco industry on how to counter the campaigns of the tobacco control movement."
In 1989 [...], Penn and Schoen Associates (PSA) [...] dispatched a proposal to Elizabeth Veanus of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) outlining how PSA would go about researching the company's prospects of establishing a branch of a smoker's rights group in Harlem. Weill wrote that his colleagues were "extremely excited" about the project. The polling, he wrote, would be undertaken by [Mark] Penn and his partner Douglas Schoen, who "have more than a decade of experience conducting groups around the country and performing research on smoking issues."
The goal of PSA's proposed research project, Weill emphasized, was "identical to your goal in entering Harlem: to get smokers' rights groups up and running with utmost speed and effectiveness." "Do they understand the ways in which smokers are penalized by society? Sure, they know about non-smoking areas but do they know that smoking is over-taxed and over-regulated?."
Another longstanding client of [Penn's company] PSB is the world's largest private tobacco company, Philip Morris (PM). Like RJR, Phillip Morris had tried to mobilize "grassroots" opposition to tobacco control measures. It was a strategy that relied on using a front group — in Phillip Morris's case the National Smokers Alliance — to shore up political opposition to reforms while it attempted to rebuild its political defenses via traditional lobbying and PR campaigns. But as the court findings against tobacco became more frequent, Phillip Morris and other tobacco companies' political standing evaporated. As the evidence of the dramatic health impacts of environmental tobacco smoke grew, support for bans on smoking in public spaces — such as bars and restaurants — grew. Once more, [Penn Schoen] PSB volunteered to help defend the indefensible.
[On April 7, 1994, just one week before] the seven CEO's of the major tobacco companies gave testimony before Congress, each swearing under oath that they did not believe nicotine was addictive [...] [Penn Schoen] PSB sent Phillip Morris a proposed research plan on the company's Accommodation Program, a PR campaign designed to help deflate controversy over secondhand smoke in the workplace and preempt local and state legislation to end smoking in public places. The proposal made it quite clear that the research would dovetail with PM's defensive battle plan: "comprehensive, independent, and credible Penn + Schoen research can help promote accommodation as the reasonable alternative to bans and demonstrate that smoking bans are bad for business." The proposal, which came with a $479,000 price tag, then sketched the three-stage research [Penn Schoen] PSB would undertake to arrive at predetermined conclusions.
As part of its pitch, [Penn Schoen] PSB stressed that it sympathized with Phillip Morris's political plight: "We want to help re-frame the smoking debate in terms that will contrast with the extremist notions often portrayed in the media as the norm, and that are increasingly dominating public discourse."
(Note the framing strategy, so familiar a part of who Hillary Clinton is: portray the norm as an extreme, then try to 'triangulate' a 'third way' that meets corporate client's bottom-line. Public interest and public policy be damned.)
In 2001, Phillip Morris hired Penn to help develop strategies to convince the Democrats in Congress "to support reasonable regulation" of the tobacco industry. Phillip Morris's plan was to have surveys conducted by both Democratic and Republican pollsters; the results would support a "compromise" bipartisan position on tobacco regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It figured that Phillip Morris-approved changes with bipartisan support would be more palatable than tougher standards that could emerge later.
In a summary memo of its 2001 poll, Penn and his colleague Josh King explained that they tested what they referred to as the two "extreme" positions: "do not regulate tobacco at all" and "regulate tobacco out of existence." The pollsters then presented Phillip Morris's preferred elements of FDA regulation. This approach allowed them to conclude that "there are broadly appealing 'third way' approaches that voters can accept by a large majority."
(\snark!\ 'third way' ROFLMAO B'bye, Bruce Reed, Al From and Will Marshill, and take Dick Morris with you.)
The poll was just the result Phillip Morris was looking to use in its lobbying strategy, which continues today. [...] In the accompanying media release, Penn proclaimed that the results indicated that the public [...] "shows they [voters] want real action and an end to the bickering among alternatives."
OK, so the man in charge of Hillary's campaign has been a top national lobbyist for decades for the cancer-causing tobacco industry. And he is the HEAD of Clinton's NATIONAL CAMPAIGN, with veto power over her entire message. There is nothing more venal in DC than this -- even if Hillary and Penn are dues-paying members of the "Democratic" Party.
How. Dare. She. Attack. Obama. On. These. Grounds.
But Penn has other clients besides tobacco. For example, nuclear industry, oil companies, and mercenaries. Just a quick view of these, again from PRwatch.org's Bob Burton:
In addition to the tobacco industry, [Penn Schoen] PSB has worked for clients on other controversial projects. In one 1994 document, the firm listed its work in advising the American Nuclear Energy Council on developing "a proactive strategy to limit opposition to further study of the [Yucca Mountain nuclear waste] storage facility, and for immediate acceptance." (It failed.) Another campaign was for the oil company, Texaco, on "key regulatory issues affecting the oil industry including gasoline taxes, alternative fuels and reformulated mandates, and global warming." Another was a study for an unspecified "industry coalition on regulatory issues," which [Penn Schoen] PSB boasted "was cited as a justification for a 90 day moratorium on federal regulations imposed by the Bush Administration in 1992." Another was for the Council on Packaging in the Environment (COPE), a packaging industry organization. Penn's firm claimed that they had been able to "guide COPE in influencing current policy making with regard to the environment." When he joined B-M as its global CEO, the press release crowed that [Penn Schoen] PSB had been "closely associated with Burson-Marsteller on developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector."
Like many in the PR industry, Penn declines to list publicly the clients for whom he has worked. [...] But what we do know is troubling enough. Penn and others in his firm have worked for the tobacco industry, the nuclear industry, the packaging industry, an oil company and other industry groups. Notably, Penn's official Burson-Marsteller biographical note avoids mentioning his work for the Tobacco Institute, R.J. Reynolds or Philip Morris. It does mention that he has has worked for Hillary Clinton "for over six years, since he ran the polling and messaging for her successful election to the US Senate in 2000."
In May 2007 Bloomberg reported that in a blog post, titled "Workin' With Hillary," Penn wrote that one of the benefits of "mixing of corporate and political work" was that it was "helpful in cross-pollinating new ideas and skills." "And," he added, "I have found it good for business."
Oh, but there's more. Much, much, much more.
Mark Penn is just the tip of the iceberg in the corrupt Clinton machine. But he's not just some low-level state functionary in the campaign, he is the man behind her Senate election and her campaign now.
It's late and this diary is already too long. Perhaps someone else can pick up the thread of other Clinton camp lobbyists. It's hard to know where to start as there are so, so many of them among her team. (Major kudos to Senator John Edwards and all his supporters on this, of course; he has led the charge in calling attention to the plutocracy confronting America.) I invite dKos commenters to add to the list of ties Clinton Inc. has to lobbyists and the plutocracy that runs America.
[*UPDATE: I do NOT mean all Hillary supporters, sorry if it sounded that way. I mean her conniving spin squad. The vast majority of Hillary supporters are of course decent people. But many of them do not know that the #1 man orchestrating her campaign is a tobacco/nuclear/oil/mercenary industry shill. And her team is responsible for the attacks her operatives make. Tks for the comments.]