What McCain and Obama set out to do seems simple enough: ban lobbyists from their campaign staffs, thereby appealing to voters who have grown cynical in the wake of endless scandals involving politicians doing favors for lobbyists who plied them with campaign contributions.
Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) adopted such a standard when he launched his White House bid last year. Obama says that he now has no federal lobbyists on his campaign payroll and accepts no donations from lobbyists -- what would be a historic standard for a major-party presidential nominee.
Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), eager to compete as a reformer but stung by the disclosure of some of his aides' lobbying clients, announced his own policy this month: He too now bars lobbyists from staff positions. He will, however, continue to accept donations from them.
Unlike Obama, he also requires volunteer advisors to the campaign to disclose any lobbying ties and to agree not to lobby the candidate nor his Senate staff during the campaign.
While McCain and Obama exchanged barbs last week, it was McCain who was on the defensive after the resignation of five of his aides. They included a key fundraiser, Tom Loeffler, a former congressman who lobbied for corporate clients and the government of Saudi Arabia. Two other aides left after revelations that their lobbying firm had once represented the military government of Burma, now known as Myanmar.
In the Obama campaign, top strategist David Axelrod is an owner of a political consulting firm in Chicago and also is a partner in a company that specializes in what BusinessWeek magazine described as "astroturfing," also called grass-roots lobbying. It has organized campaigns to build public support to influence state and local government decisions, sometimes working with corporate-backed "citizen organizations" that espouse the company's point of view.
Axelrod's company, ASK Public Strategies, has practiced this sort of targeted advertising and outreach in several states, working for corporate clients such as Madison Square Garden LP in New York and Commonwealth Edison, an electric utility in Illinois.
A few years ago, when the power company faced a government decision on whether to extend a rate freeze, Axelrod's firm developed radio and TV ads sponsored by a ComEd-funded group called Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity. The ads warned of potential California-style electrical blackouts in Illinois if the rate freeze were extended.
