SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top campaign advisor is being paid to provide marketing strategy to AT&T Inc. at a time when the governor's office is involved in negotiations on legislation potentially worth billions of dollars to the telecommunications giant.
Political consultant Matthew Dowd's involvement with the governor and AT&T at the same time presents, at minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest, government watchdogs warned.
Dowd and his consulting firm are currently assisting San Antonio-based AT&T with the rollout of its U-verse service in Texas.
Governor's advisor: A front-page article Tuesday about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top campaign advisor and his consulting work for AT&T Inc. gave the wrong bill number for a proposal in the Legislature to regulate how companies would provide television programming over phone lines. The bill number is AB 2987, not AB 2789.
The product is designed to compete with cable TV by sending television programming and a bundle of Internet and communications services over existing and upgraded telephone lines.
At the same time, in California, AT&T is lobbying for passage of a bill being carried by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), AB 2789, that would ease the financial and regulatory burdens of installing the new technology for the industry.
"If AT&T hired Dowd to sell TV, and Dowd also has been hired to sell Schwarzenegger on TV, you've got to wonder if Dowd also is selling your governor on AT&T's legislative agenda for TV," said Andrew Wheat, a public interest activist. Wheat is research director of Texans for Public Justice, which tracks the influence of money and corporate power in the state's politics.
Dowd declined to be interviewed. But a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's reelection campaign said that neither the political strategist nor his Austin, Texas-based consulting firm, ViaNovo, had acted improperly.
"The firm does no work for AT&T in California and has had no conversations with the governor's campaign or state staff regarding AT&T," Julie Soderlund said. "The scope of their work in Texas [for AT&T] is limited to consumer branding in the marketplace."
Schwarzenegger hired Dowd, chief strategist for the national Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, this year. Dowd's arrival was part of a shake-up in the governor's political and policy staffs after four initiatives Schwarzenegger supported went down to defeat in November in a bitterly fought special election.
In California, the Assembly-passed bill, now before the state Senate, would allow phone companies to bypass regulation by city and county governments when they install costly networks to deliver video, Internet and phone services to homes.
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