Democrats Assail, and Tap, 'Special Interests'
nytimes.com
By GLEN JUSTICE and JOHN TIERNEY
THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 31, 2004
CHARLESTON, S.C. — 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." |
