FRANK RICH: List of Dem politicians fiercely opposed to existing order=1 & only 1 - Elizabeth Warren

[kpete]

The Stench of the Potomac
Washington may be a dysfunctional place to govern, but it’s working better than ever as a marketplace for cashing in. And that’s thanks, more than anything, to the Democratic Establishment.

By Frank Rich

Among Democrats, the list of national politicians fiercely opposed to the existing order begins and ends with Elizabeth Warren.

................

“When I am president,” Obama had said in 2008, “I will start by closing the revolving door in the White House that’s allowed people to use their administration job as a stepping-stone to further their lobbying careers.” Puzzling over how so many colleagues have strayed from this credo, the former press secretary Robert Gibbs has theorized that either “somehow we have all changed” or, alternatively, “maybe Washington changed us.” Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that the president himself has been either passive or ineffectual when it comes to exerting any moral authority over the White House alumni who’ve been streaming through the revolving door.

..............

Among Democrats, the list of national politicians fiercely opposed to the existing order begins and ends with Elizabeth Warren. Even now Obama is toying with appointing Larry Summers as Fed chair, despite his past in Rubinomics during the Clinton era and his present as a paid consultant to Citigroup. The two most likely Democratic prospects to succeed Obama in the White House, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both came of political age in the revolving-door Washington of This Town; many of the most successful fixers in the book are one degree of separation from one or both of them. Sometimes these alumni are one degree of separation from ethical conflict, too. The ubiquitous Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, as inescapable as canapés in Leibovich’s narrative, is currently running for governor of Virginia even as a Department of Homeland Security investigation into a disputed visa has ensnared a company with ties to both him and Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham. Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, best known now for her marital martyrdom, was discovered by Politico in May to have taken on other clients, including Teneo, a business and banking “global advisory firm” co-founded by the Bill Clinton majordomo Doug Band, in her final months in the taxpayers’ employ as a part-time consultant at the State Department.

This crowd is as intractable as it is incorrigible. There are no term limits, because Washington amnesia perennially wipes the slate clean. No one seems to remember anymore the furor kicked off by a 1998 Post “Style”-section piece in which Beltway grandees like David Broder and Cokie Roberts vented to Sally Quinn about how the impeached president had trashed their pristine city. “Regardless of whether his fortunes improve,” Quinn concluded, “Bill Clinton has essentially lost the Washington Establishment for good.” Well, that was then, and this is now. As This Town makes clear, these days Clinton alumni are the Washington Establishment, whether in the Obama administration or on K Street, and they can hardly wait for the greater dividends that will accrue should the former First Couple be restored to the White House in 2016. If that happens, Leibovich will not have to write a sequel, because it is already writing itself.


MORE:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/this-town-washington-lobbyists-2013-8/index3.html

[cali]

1. I really love Rich. He cuts right through the bullshit.

this is a fantastic article, well worth the read. Thanks for posting it, kpete. k&r

[Little Star]

2. k&r

[burnodo]

3. The former Republican Elizabeth Warren

I think that may say a lot about the times we live in as well

[cali]

4. This parargraph encapsulates the entrenched corruption demonstrating how

bipartisan it is.

The tale of how the Obama economic team was recruited en masse from Robert Rubin acolytes who either facilitated Wall Street’s pre-crash recklessness while in the Clinton administration or cashed in on it later (or, like Rubin, did both) never loses its power to shock, and is revisited in all three books. Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff as Clinton Treasury secretary, not only served as the Obama transition team’s personnel director but moonlighted as a Citigroup managing director while doing so. “Obama essentially entrusted the repairing of the china shop to the bulls who’d helped ransack it,” Connaughton writes. Leibovich updates the story of the tacky prehistory of the Obama White House with its aftermath—the steady parade of Obama alumni who traded change we can believe in for cash on the barrelhead as soon as they left public service. The starry list includes, among many others, Peter Orszag (director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, now at Citi), Jake Siewert (the Treasury Department counselor turned chief flack for Goldman Sachs), and David Plouffe (the campaign manager and senior presidential adviser who did consulting for Boeing and General Electric). In a class by herself is Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director “who was instrumental in helping Michelle Obama set up her ‘Let’s Move!’ program to stop obesity in children”: She signed on as a consultant with “food manufacturers and media firms to block restrictions on commercials for sugary foods targeting children.”

It's so sickening:

But this syndrome didn’t start with the Obama administration and won’t end with it. Perhaps the more useful question to ask is when and why this change came over Washington’s entire Democratic hierarchy. There have always been lobbyists in both parties, of course, and there have always been powerful Democratic influence peddlers to match their Republican counterparts. Clark Clifford, Robert Strauss, and Vernon Jordan—the respective pals of Truman, LBJ, and Bill Clinton—are among the most legendary Washington operators of the post–World War II era. But what once was an unsavory appendix to the legislative process has scaled up over the past three decades to become a dominant, if not the dominant, Washington private industry. And while some former office holders, senators and members of Congress included, have always joined the lobbying ranks, lobbying and its adjuncts have now become the career havens of choice for Establishment Democrats with government résumés, not just for Republicans traditionally aligned with corporate interests. There’s more status than shame in joining this gold rush—as we see in This Town—and many of the Democratic practitioners barely pay lip service to the ideal of siding with working- and middle-class Americans against the plutocrats of finance and industry. They are too busy rushing to partner with Republicans in servicing the very same corporate accounts.

No sooner did the Democrat Evan Bayh bolt from the Senate in 2010 with a sanctimonious Times op-ed decrying the “corrosive system of campaign financing” than he joined with Andrew Card, the former Bush chief of staff, in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby against corporate regulatory reform. No sooner did BP despoil the Gulf than it effortlessly recruited what Leibovich calls a bipartisan “Beltway dream team” that included both a former top spokeswoman for Dick Cheney and the Democratic super-­lobbyist and fund-raiser Tony Podesta, who was also a prominent ambassador for corporate interests at the 2012 Obama convention in Charlotte. In the past four years of partisan gridlock, it’s become a lazy and tiresome trope of centrist Washington punditry that the city would work if only Democrats and Republicans got together for a drink after-hours the way Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did back in the day. But the truth is that Democratic and Republican potentates do get together—every night, lubricated with plenty of ­alcohol—albeit to further their clients’ interests rather than those of the voters.

But this syndrome didn’t start with the Obama administration and won’t end with it. Perhaps the more useful question to ask is when and why this change came over Washington’s entire Democratic hierarchy. There have always been lobbyists in both parties, of course, and there have always been powerful Democratic influence peddlers to match their Republican counterparts. Clark Clifford, Robert Strauss, and Vernon Jordan—the respective pals of Truman, LBJ, and Bill Clinton—are among the most legendary Washington operators of the post–World War II era. But what once was an unsavory appendix to the legislative process has scaled up over the past three decades to become a dominant, if not the dominant, Washington private industry. And while some former office holders, senators and members of Congress included, have always joined the lobbying ranks, lobbying and its adjuncts have now become the career havens of choice for Establishment Democrats with government résumés, not just for Republicans traditionally aligned with corporate interests. There’s more status than shame in joining this gold rush—as we see in This Town—and many of the Democratic practitioners barely pay lip service to the ideal of siding with working- and middle-class Americans against the plutocrats of finance and industry. They are too busy rushing to partner with Republicans in servicing the very same corporate accounts.

No sooner did the Democrat Evan Bayh bolt from the Senate in 2010 with a sanctimonious Times op-ed decrying the “corrosive system of campaign financing” than he joined with Andrew Card, the former Bush chief of staff, in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby against corporate regulatory reform. No sooner did BP despoil the Gulf than it effortlessly recruited what Leibovich calls a bipartisan “Beltway dream team” that included both a former top spokeswoman for Dick Cheney and the Democratic super-­lobbyist and fund-raiser Tony Podesta, who was also a prominent ambassador for corporate interests at the 2012 Obama convention in Charlotte. In the past four years of partisan gridlock, it’s become a lazy and tiresome trope of centrist Washington punditry that the city would work if only Democrats and Republicans got together for a drink after-hours the way Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did back in the day. But the truth is that Democratic and Republican potentates do get together—every night, lubricated with plenty of ­alcohol—albeit to further their clients’ interests rather than those of the voters.

[kpete]

5. thanks cali

lots of eye openers in this piece
thanks for adding to my post...

the truth is that Democratic and Republican potentates do get together—every night, lubricated with plenty of ­alcohol—albeit to further their clients’ interests rather than those of the voters.

peace, kp

[AtomicKitten]

6. With all the chatter about 2016

I want this one --->

[Scuba]

8. Me too ...

[snagglepuss]

7. k & r

[felix_numinous]

9. I cannot envision Senator Warren

appointing Republicans to cabinet positions. (But I didn't envision President Obama doing this either...) She seems the best bet as next presidential candidate so far, IMHO.

I also like Grayson and O'Malley.

[kentuck]

10. Just watch who they pick for their Cabinet...

And you will know how they will govern. We did not want to accept that reality with Obama but he wanted nothing to do with liberals.

[Zorra]

11. +1 nt