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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (7842)	12/19/2003 11:51:36 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (8) \| Respond to of 10965

The New Electable Howard Dean Message 19613682

To: Mephisto who wrote (7842)	1/30/2004 3:49:59 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 10965

"Howard Dean, shifting easily to dart thrower from the target he played in earlier debates, questioned Senator Kerry's record and effectiveness. Dr. Dean's challenge came more than midway through a debate that up until then had been largely civil, with the seven candidates focusing their fire on Mr. Bush instead of on one another. "Just to make this a little less mellow," Dr. Dean began, setting up a suggestion that Mr. Kerry had little to show for his 19 years in Washington. "When I was governor, I got everybody in my state who is under 18 health insurance. "Now, Senator Kerry is the front-runner, and I mean him no insult, but in 19 years in the Senate, Senator Kerry sponsored nine, 11 bills that had anything to do with health care, and not one of them passed. If you want a president who is going to get results, I suggest that you look at somebody who did get results in my state." Article: Democratic Contenders Attack Bush on Iraq, Terrorism, Trade and Economy Source: The New York Times Date: January 30, 2004 By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and DAVID M. HALBFINGER Reference: nytimes.com For story excerpts see: Message 19752751

To: Mephisto who wrote (7842)	1/31/2004 4:26:51 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

"Dean, who for much of last year dominated the race for the right to challenge Bush on Nov. 2, launched a new attack on Kerry, calling him a typical Washington insider beholden to lobbyists and special interests. Citing reports in the Washington Post and New York Times that Kerry had raised more money from paid lobbyists than any other senator in the past 15 years, Dean said the Massachusetts lawmaker was no better than Bush in that respect. "We are not going to beat George Bush by nominating someone who is the handmaiden of special interests, " Dean told hundreds of cheering supporters at a rally in Tucson." ARTICLE: Dean Says Kerry Is in Pocket of Lobbyists story.news.yahoo.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (7842)	1/31/2004 6:41:00 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 10965

Democrats Assail, and Tap, 'Special Interests' The New York Times January 31, 2004 By GLEN JUSTICE and JOHN TIERNEY CHARLESTON, S.C., Jan. 30 - The Democratic presidential hopefuls have been crossing the country this week promising to drive "special interests" and "influence peddlers" out of the White House. But campaign finance reports show some contenders benefit significantly from the lobbyists and special interests that they attack. While Senator John Kerry regularly promises to stand up to "big corporations," his campaign has taken money from executives on Wall Street and those representing the telecommunications industry, which is under his purview in Congress. Mr. Kerry denounces President Bush for catering to the rich, but he has depended more heavily on affluent donors than the other leading Democrats except for another populist, Senator John Edwards. Mr. Kerry's spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, said the contributions had no effect on his votes. "Anybody who thought they were buying influence with John Kerry can look at his votes and know they're not getting their money's worth," Ms. Cutter said. Mr. Edwards tells audiences, "I've never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist and I never will." That might be literally true - not many lobbyists give dimes these days - but Mr. Edwards has accepted at least a few contributions from current and former lobbyists, and his campaign manager was a registered Washington lobbyist in 2002. Mr. Edwards has also accepted millions of dollars from lawyers, including members of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, a trade group that wields enormous influence on tort reform. An ex-president of the group, Fred Baron, is a financial co-chairman for Mr. Edwards's campaign. The new president of the group and all four executive officers, have each given $2,000. Mr. Edwards's spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, said that the campaign's policy was not to take money from anyone registered at the time as a Washington lobbyist, but that it had taken money from people who formerly or subsequently worked as lobbyists. Ms. Palmieri also pointed to Mr. Edwards's proposals to limit lobbyists' gifts and activities. "John Edwards supports the strongest proposal on the table for campaign-finance reform," she said. To be sure, none of the Democrats have collected donations on the scale of President Bush's campaign, and they generally avoid donations from political action committees. But the Democrats are hardly naifs when it comes to enlisting support from special interests in Washington and elsewhere, from corporate leaders and from unions in the public and private sectors. "Special interests are the Darth Vader of contemporary politics," Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University, said. "Everybody loves to hate them. But politicians can't live without them, because they need money to get their message out. It's very much a love-hate relationship." According to studies by campaign finance watchdog groups, Howard Dean and Gen. Wesley K. Clark on affluent donors are less dependent than Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards, but they also collect money from corporate executives and rely for guidance on the Washington insiders they criticize. General Clark, who had been lobbying for the Acxiom Corporation of Little Rock, Ark., on domestic security, was a registered lobbyist himself when he began his quest for the presidency. When Roy Neel was put in charge of Dr. Dean's campaign on Wednesday, he was not the first lobbyist to work on behalf of the campaign. In his victory speech on Tuesday night in New Hampshire, Mr. Kerry sounded a familiar theme when he declared, "I have a message for the influence peddlers, for the polluters, the H.M.O.'s, the big drug companies that get in the way, the big oil and the special interests who now call the White House their home. `We're coming, you're going, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!' " Mr. Kerry is an experienced fund-raiser, having worked to raise money while on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and for his own campaigns. In his campaign for the nomination, he has collected more than $1 million from employees of securities and investment businesses. He took in $70,000 from employees of Citigroup and $62,500 from workers at Goldman Sachs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign finance trends. Mr. Kerry's top career donor is the law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, according to a study by Chuck Lewis, executive director of another campaign-finance group, the Center for Public Integrity. Mr. Kerry received $231,000 over the course of his career from lawyers in the firm, where his brother, Cameron F. Kerry, is a telecommunications lawyer. The firm has represented clients like the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association and AT&T Wireless Services, whose industry falls under the jurisdiction of a Senate subcommittee that includes Mr. Kerry, the report said. "You can't raise millions of dollars for politics without being entangled with lobbyists and special interests," Mr. Lewis said. Mr. Kerry has criticized the current "creed of greed" and faulted Mr. Bush letting "the privileged ride high and reap the rewards." But his typical donors share at least one similarity with the president's, an ability to give $2,000, the legal maximum. Fifty-five percent of Mr. Kerry's money has come from donors giving $2,000. For Mr. Bush, the comparable figure is 73 percent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center's analysis shows that small donors, those giving $200 or less, have provided 12 percent of Mr. Kerry's campaign money, the same percentage they provided for Mr. Bush. Mr. Edwards collected even less, 3 percent, of his campaign money from contributions of $200 or less, the analysis showed. In his stump speech about "the two Americas," Mr. Edwards promises to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and the powerful. But 65 percent of the money in his campaign has come from Americans who are able to donate $2,000 or more, chiefly lawyers, according to the research group. Mr. Edwards, a former trial lawyer, received $7.5 million from members of the legal profession through September 2003, the analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics shows. That was half the money he had raised to that point. Mr. Edwards routinely inveighs against the influence of lobbyists and the exploitation of consumers by big corporations, predatory lenders and hidden fees of credit-card companies. But his own campaign is managed by Nick Baldick, who has worked for concerns that have lobbied on behalf of AT&T, Mastercard International and Visa USA. Mr. Baldick was a registered lobbyist as late as 2002, but is no longer, lobbying records show. Ms. Palmieri, spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards, said Mr. Baldick had not done any lobbying personally while at the firm and had been erroneously registered as a lobbyist by his partner. She also said the campaign returned any contribution that it learned was from a currently registered lobbyist. One lobbyist independently confirmed in an interview that his contribution had been returned after the campaign realized his occupation. But the policy allowed the campaign to accept contributions from Washington insiders like John Podesta, a prominent aide to President Bill Clinton who went on to work as a lobbyist. He was out of the business last year, when he made a $500 donation to Mr. Edwards's campaign. But today he is once again a registered lobbyist. "This was not the plank in his platform that caused me to give him money," Mr. Podesta said of Mr. Edwards's policy. "In my mind, this is a gimmick. But it's a gimmick that points out something important, the flow of special interest to the Bush campaign and the special favors they receive. Edwards has found a gimmick to highlight that." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (7842)	1/31/2004 7:23:23 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10965

Kerry Leads in Lobby Money Anti-Special-Interest Campaign Contrasts With Funding By Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A01 Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has made a fight against corporate special interests a centerpiece of his front-running campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, has raised more money from paid lobbyists than any other senator over the past 15 years, federal records show. Kerry, a 19-year veteran of the Senate who fought and won four expensive political campaigns, has received nearly $640,000 from lobbyists, many representing telecommunications and financial companies with business before his committee, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. For his presidential race, Kerry has raised more than $225,000 from lobbyists, better than twice as much as his nearest Democratic rival. Like President Bush, Kerry has also turned to a number of corporate officials and lobbyists to "bundle" contributions from smaller donors, often in sums of $50,000 or more, records provided by his campaign show. "Senator Kerry has taken individual contributions from lobbyists, but that has not stopped him from fighting against special interests on behalf of average Americans," said Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. "If anyone thinks a contribution can buy Kerry's vote, then they are wasting their money." Kerry said on Jan. 19 that he would "happily release any lobbyist meeting I've ever had," but he has yet to do so. Cutter said Kerry will not release records until he compiles data on every meeting over the past 19 years, which will be a "pretty lengthy process." Kerry will not release it "piecemeal," she said. Most members of Congress and presidential candidates turn to corporations and their Washington-based lobbyists for political assistance, most often with fundraising. All the presidential candidates take money from special interests, including Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who like Kerry has targeted corporations and lobbyists in his stump speeches. And Bush has far outpaced them all. Because Kerry has made his fight against "Washington special interests" a new theme of his presidential campaign, campaign rivals and campaign finance watchdogs have accused him of hypocrisy. Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a newcomer to national politics, is running a television ad that hits Kerry and others for ties to special interests. "Special interest deals. Promises unkept. Do we really need another Washington politician?" the narrator says in the ad. "A politician won't change the way Washington works." "John Kerry has been withdrawing money from the special interest bank for his entire career and now -- because it's the popular thing to do -- he wants us to believe that he's going to close the account and go after the people that have funded his political career," said Jay Carson, a spokesman for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. "The note of reality is he has been brought to you by special interests," said Charles Lewis of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, a watchdog group that has closely studied the senator's relationship with special interests. "It's very hard [for Kerry] to utter this rhetoric without some hollowness to it." "I think it's harder for someone like Kerry to take on" Bush over special interests "because he's taken money . . . from a lot of the same" corporate sectors, added Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors money in politics. Dean, who has raised more money than Kerry in this campaign, has taken considerably less from lobbyists. Cutter said her boss would have no problem fighting Bush on the issue because "Kerry has spent his career fighting against special interests, while Bush has never met a special interest he doesn't like. While Kerry was fighting to keep oil companies from drilling in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], the White House was inviting them in to tea." Kerry or any other longtime politician inevitably faces this charge when running for president as a self-styled reformer. Unless the candidate is someone like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has made a name for himself by fighting for reform and against corporate giveaways, or a self-financed independent, like Ross Perot in the 1990s, it is very hard to turn the theme into an effective campaign message, Noble said. "It's the classic situation: Most politicians get money from what they are calling special interests because they are the ones who give." Kerry, who did not begin his campaign with a heavy emphasis on fighting lobbyists, appears to have usurped the special interest message from Edwards and Dean over the past few months. Now, Kerry's standard campaign refrain includes this warning to the "special interests" and their lobbyists: "We're coming, you're going and don't let the door hit you on the way out." Kerry says he would extend the current one-year lobbying ban on government officials to five years and issue an executive order requiring a public record of all meetings between government employees and lobbyists. Since the early days of the Bush administration, Democrats, including Kerry, have been pressuring Vice President Cheney to disclose his contacts with energy officials who influenced the White House energy policy, making this a political issue for 2004. Under current law, lobbyists must register with the federal government, list their clients and in very general terms describe the issues they are working on and which branch of government they are seeking to influence. White House and congressional officials are not required to disclose their meetings. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), co-author of the newest campaign finance law, said Kerry was not one of the half-dozen members who put together the reform package but "he's always been one of our most consistent and strongest supporters." Kerry unilaterally swore off political action committee funds from corporations during his four Senate runs, a popular position for reform advocates before large, unregulated of "soft money" from corporations, unions and rich people started dominating politics in the 1990s. "It's great he didn't take PAC money, but let's not go crazy here," said Lewis. The reason: As Kerry was pushing reforms and boasting of his PAC-free campaigns, he was aggressively soliciting money from individuals working for companies and ringing up much bigger checks from corporations in the form of soft money. Kerry has not been involved in any of the major fundraising scandals of the past three decades -- although he was one of several politicians who took money from Taiwanese American businessman Johnny Chung, who was convicted of contributing illegally to Bill Clinton and many others. The Hill, a Washington-based publication covering Capitol Hill, this month reported that Kerry in 1999 lobbied the Coast Guard on a rule-making process that benefited a foreign company represented by Cassidy & Associates. Soon after, employees of Cassidy & Associates sent Kerry $7,250 in bundled contributions. Jim Ruggieri, the Coast Guard official who handled the matter, told the paper it was highly unusual for a senator to intervene on such a matter. A review of FEC and other data by The Washington Post found that Kerry has raked in millions from U.S. corporations, especially financial companies such as Citigroup and telecom firms, including Rubert Murdoch's News Corp., which also flew one of his Senate staffers to California for a meeting. In the presidential race, Kerry has accepted contributions from the same "special interests" he accuses Bush of being too cozy with: HMOs, drug companies and energy firms. He has raised nearly $27,000 from oil and gas companies, tops of the remaining Democratic candidates; $34,000 from health maintenance organizations, second to Dean; and $18,500 from pharmaceutical companies, third behind Dean and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.). Even after subtracting money Kerry has raised for his presidential campaign, he ranks in the top four Senate beneficiaries of lobbyist cash, the CRP found. One of Kerry's biggest -- and perhaps most controversial -- donors has been the Boston-based law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. The group, which lobbies on behalf of the telecommunications industry -- and employs the senator's brother, Cameron -- is his single largest contributor over the course of his Senate career. David Leiter, Kerry's former chief of staff, is vice president of a lobbying company affiliated with the Boston-based law firm. The Center for Public Integrity criticized the senator's relationship with the firm in a little-publicized report released last year, accusing him of pushing the agenda of those helping to pay his bills. "Kerry, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has sponsored or co-sponsored a number of bills favorable to the industry and has written letters to government agencies on behalf of the clientele of his largest donor," the report said. The Boston law firm's client include the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), an umbrella group for telecommunications companies. Since 1999, Kerry has sponsored at least two bills and co-sponsored half a dozen that were sought by the CTIA, including industry-backed plans for winning lucrative auctions of spectrum, or airwaves. Thomas Wheeler, the former chief executive of the CTIA, and Christopher Putala, a lobbyist for the group, are both among Kerry's biggest presidential fundraisers. Cutter, Kerry's spokeswoman, provided a list of several industry-backed bills Kerry opposed. "Kerry has never been swayed by any donation on a vote. He consistently votes to protect consumers and workers," she said. Political researcher Brian Faler contributed to this report.