Huh?
From TIME
Tuesday, Feb. 03, 2009
Daschle's Problems: When Is a Lobbyist Not a Lobbyist?
By Michael Scherer / WASHINGTON
According to the White House, the important thing is that Tom Daschle is not technically a lobbyist. "If you're not registered to lobby, you can't be a lobbyist," explains White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. And Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who is up for the top health post in the Obama Cabinet, never filled out the paperwork to register.
That distinction matters quite a bit because Barack Obama promised during his campaign that lobbyists "would not get a job in my White House." On his first full day in office, that pledge turned into the new President's first official policy, when he signed an Executive Order banning lobbyists from serving in his Administration. The order did come with some fine print, however — a waiver process that the White House counsel could invoke at will in the name of the "public interest," allowing an undetermined number of former lobbyists to effectively violate the new policy.
To date, a handful of these waivers have been proposed, including, most controversially, one for William Lynn, a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon who has been tapped to serve in the No. 2 job at the Pentagon. But the controversy over the waivers, which have been criticized by both Democratic and Republican Senators, is just one of the perception problems dogging Obama's new ethics policy. Another issue stems from the people nominated to the Administration who have worked in the lobbying business but are not technically lobbyists — people, in other words, like Daschle or former Senator George Mitchell, the new Middle East peace envoy who previously served as chairman of a law firm that has done lobbying and legal work for many clients in the region, including the leader of Dubai.
Although he never registered, Daschle, in fact, made millions of dollars after he left government doing stuff that looks, smells and tastes a lot like lobbying — work that led to the taxes flap that forced him to apologize to his former colleagues on Monday for what he called a "completely inadvertent" mistake. And while that failure to pay more than $128,000 in back taxes and interest has briefly marred his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), it's the ethical gray area Daschle's advisory work represents that has called into question Obama's promise of changing the culture in Washington.
Daschle, for instance, was a high-paid "policy adviser" at Alston & Bird, a lobbying firm with dozens of brand-name pharmaceutical and health-services clients... During his time at Alston, a wide range of for-profit enterprises with interests in influencing government health policy — including giants like UnitedHealth, GE Healthcare and the Health Industry Distributors Association — paid Daschle five-figure sums for speeches. UnitedHealth was also a "client" of Daschle's at Alston, as was the Great Plains Indian Gaming Association, a trade group representing tribes with casinos in the upper Midwest. And then there is Leo Hindery Jr., the former chairman of the cable-television industry's lobbying group, who hired Daschle as an adviser on a new investment firm and gifted him more than $100,000 in car services from Hindery's limousine driver, which the former South Dakota Senator failed to pay taxes on.
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http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1876550,00.html
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