Fred Thompson, Lobbyist?
The Democrats' have already put out several hit pieces on Fred Thompson; one of the points they emphasize is that he worked as a Washington lobbyist before and after his service in the Senate. Today, the Associated Press took up the theme in an article titled Looking at Thompson's Lobbying Past:
Republican Fred Thompson, who likes to cast himself in the role of Washington outsider, has a long history as a political insider who earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government.As a lobbyist for more than 20 years, billion-dollar corporations paid Thompson for his access to members of Congress and White House staff.
You get the drift. There's a reason why people in public life generally become lobbyists after they've run for office, not before. Lobbyists are like lawyers (many of them, like Thompson, are lawyers) in that they are available for hire by clients who may or may not be "right" in a public policy sense, but who deserve an opportunity to plead their case. A lobbyist need not agree with all of his clients' positions as a policy matter, any more than a lawyer need agree with all of the postitions his clients take in litigation. But it's easy to make a lobbyist look bad by associating him with his clients' causes.
That said, the ammunition against Thompson is pretty thin. Most of his lobbying activity fell between 1975 and 1993, when, according to the AP, "lobbying clients paid him about half a million dollars." That works out to a gross of less than $30,000 a year--small potatoes, although it may not seem so to the average voter.
Thompson renewed his lobbying career after leaving the senate in January 2003, but it appears that he has only worked on behalf of a single client, Equitas, an affiliate of Lloyd's of London. From 2004 through 2006, according to Open Secrets, Equitas paid Thompson approximately $750,000.
The AP highlights three issues on which Thompson lobbied over the course of his career. The first is savings and loan deregulation:
One of his clients at the time was the Tennessee Savings and Loan League, on whose behalf Thompson lobbied for a bill to deregulate the industry. Experts say the final version of that bill played a large role in the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, opening the door to widespread fraud and mismanagement.The fiasco ultimately led to about a $150 billion taxpayer bailout of the industry, said Robert Litan, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and co-author of a 1993 report on the causes of the disaster that describes the influence of lobbyists as "pervasive, pernicious—and effective."
This is a good example of how controversial (and often false) liberal claims become "fact" over time. The heavily regulated savings and loan industry couldn't deal with either the spiraling interest rates or the innovative competition it faced beginning in the late 1970s. The industry had to be deregulated, or it was doomed. As it turned out, much of the industry was doomed anyway, and the government made things worse by encouraging risky lending practices, by enacting the Tax Reform of 1986, which rendered many S&Ls insolvent, and through regulatory mismanagement. No matter: the AP, like the Democrats, suggests that having anything to do with the "savings and loan crisis" was disreputable.
The second target is Thompson's work on behalf of the Clinch River nuclear power plant:
Thompson's first and longest-running lobbying client was Westinghouse Electric Co., for whom he lobbied in favor of nuclear energy. In 1981, he received a little less than $54,000 from the company. At the time Westinghouse was receiving federal funds for Tennessee's Clinch River nuclear project.A spokesman for Thompson, Mark Corallo, said the experimental reactor "was a local project focused on new kinds of energy at a time when the U.S. was going through an energy crisis."
The reactor was never built and the project was canceled in 1983 after the government had spent $1.7 billion on it.
Clinch River was to be a breeder reactor, a technology which was widely used in Europe at the time, but not in the U.S. I have no idea whether the project had merit or not; it was far from the only nuclear power project that was never completed. Thompson could plausibly claim to have been ahead of his time on nuclear power, but that isn't how his representation of Westinghouse will be spun.
Finally, the AP talks about Thompson's work for Equitas:
Even after Thompson left the Senate in 2003 with a plum job playing District Attorney Arthur Branch on the NBC drama series "Law & Order" he continued to lobby, this time for Equitas, a British reinsurance company that handles billions of dollars of asbestos claims for Lloyd's of London. ***The firm had complained it was being treated differently from American companies in a bill designed to remove the about 600,000 asbestos lawsuits from the courts and create a trust fund for victims. The bill was supported by companies facing lawsuits and opposed by many victims and their attorneys.
Which suggests that Thompson was trying to deprive dying asbestosis patients of their just compensation. That's nonsense, of course. But you can see the pattern: Thompson lobbied on behalf of S&L deregulation, nuclear power plants, and a giant foreign insurance company. That's not exactly the populist image that Thompson wants to present in the current campaign. In my view, he would be well served to respond aggressively whenever this topic comes up, to accept the association between himself and his clients, and to explain, forcefully, why each of these lobbying projects was consistent with conservative principles and the public interest.
The AP says that "Thompson was unavailable to comment for this article." The article's final paragraph was turned over to a representative of a liberal organization founded by Ralph Nader:
"This is no political outsider," said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for government ethics and campaign finance reform with Public Citizen. "He clearly gained a network of contacts in Congress though Howard Baker that he cashed in on and would represent anyone who would pay him."
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