BP's Army of Democratic Lobbyists

This just gets better and better as now the Democrats want to tie BP to Republicans but BP has hired some of the big names from the Democrat lobbyists. The minute we saw the name Jamie Gorlick as being hired by BP, we laughed at the insanity of the Democrats trying to tie BP to Republicans.

There are oil companies with strong Republican ties but BP in recent years is not one of them as BP courted the Democrat environmentalist movement. BP raised the amount of their contributions to Democrats in the 2008 election with Obama the top recipient at $71,000. All of sudden in 2008 BP became a company giving donations to Democrats and hiring Democrat lobbyists who were paid $16M in 2009 and yet the DNC wants to tie BP to Republicans?

Once again the DNC looks to be failing this time with a campaign to tie BP to Republicans.

Monday, June 21, 2010
BP's Army of Democratic Lobbyists [Daniel Foster]

As Rep. Joe Barton made his ill-considered apology to British Petroleum last Friday, those of us who are into this sort of thing were treated to an abortive attempt by the contemptible Markos Moulitsas to start a Twitter meme — "GO(B)P." Get it? It's a kind of portmanteau of the abbreviations for "Grand Ol' Party" and "British Petroleum," pairing them in a way that suggests the two entities are intimately intertwined. Hilarious!

But it didn't — and won't — catch on. Why? Well, this for one:

BP, which has garnered the bulk of public attention and contempt for the spill, has assembled a formidable team of Democrats for its Washington lobbying, legal and public-relations offensive. There is Tony Podesta, who heads one of the District's leading lobbying firms; legal adviser Jamie Gorelick, a top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration now at the law firm WilmerHale; Hilary Rosen, a former recording-industry lobbyist who heads the Washington office of the Brunswick Group, a public-relations consultancy; and Michael S. Berman of the Duberstein Group, who was a longtime aide to former vice president Walter F. Mondale before becoming a lobbyist.

Gorelick, who also served as a member of the 9/11 Commission, proved critical in coaching the company during tense negotiations with President Obama over the creation of a $20 billion escrow fund for spill damages, according to several sources close to the talks. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that the administration "forced" BP to set up the fund and to intensify its efforts to contain the spill.

Now, as any wise corporation would, BP hedged by hiring some Republican strategists as well (though most were subcontracted by Rosen), but that's exactly the point. Throw a rock inside the Beltway and you'll hit somebody who isn't too proud or ideologically pure to ally themselves with the oil industry when the price is right.

It's Washington, folks.

Oh, and by the bye, I wrote about the Democratic firm behind BP's "greenwashing" campaign here.

Source: National Review