The Outrage Game Bites Obama: Lobbyist ties as a campaign issue

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: The Outrage Game Bites Obama
Wednesday, Jun. 11, 2008
By MICHAEL SCHERER/WASHINGTON

....The road that led to (Jim) Johnson's withdrawal began back in February, when Obama and his Democratic allies started highlighting the many lobbyist ties that bind together the Republican campaign of John McCain.....

It was a clear win for Obama — for a time. But as McCain was being slammed in the press, Republican opposition researchers — and some enterprising investigative reporters — were plotting an outrage backlash. Did it matter, for instance, that David Axelrod, Obama's political mastermind, had worked for a firm that led a public relations effort for Exelon, the utility giant? Would anyone notice that the man who helped convince Obama to run, former Senator Tom Daschle, works for a lobbying firm? Should voters care that former lobbyists also populate Obama's staff and current lobbyists offer him unpaid advice?...

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For those who closely observe politics or work in the business, none of this is surprising. Nearly all the nation's brightest, and even idealistic, political professionals take jobs for wealthy interests in off years. Both McCain and Obama know this, and no matter how many conflict-of-interest policies they construct, the next Administration will be populated by people who have previously been paid large sums by companies and organizations that want to bend government to their whims.

But the outrage game will continue because it works as a political matter, especially for influencing those voters who do not devote inordinate amounts of time following the play-by-play of the election. Talk to either of the campaigns, and they will tell you that the goal of this press-release gotcha game is to create vague impressions in the minds of voters, not fully developed thoughts. How can McCain be a reformer if he works with lobbyists? Isn't Obama a hypocrite for hiring such well-connected influence brokers? Partisans, meanwhile, filter the information based on their preconceptions. They will forgive Obama's less-flattering connections but hyperventilate over McCain's, or vice versa.

Of course what matters is what the two candidates will actually do in office, and the company McCain and Obama keep are not entirely irrelevant to that question. Nor does the outrage game paper over some of the real differences between the two candidates on issues of money in politics. Obama, for instance, does not take money from registered lobbyists, while McCain does, a fact that the Democrat argues insulates him from improper influence. This argument is complicated by the fact that Obama continues to take money from the corporate executives who employ those lobbyists.

The question for the voting public, and for political reporters, is how to filter all this outrage, which shoots out like a fire hose on a daily basis. If we fall prey to the daily back-and-forth, as fun as it might be, we risk losing sight of the stuff that matters....

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1813602,00.html