[Analysis] Barbour Lobbying Firm Staying Blood Red
The Politico in Washington is reporting that Barbour’s old (?) lobbying firm is holding steady against Democratic business even in a new D.C.:
Barbour Griffith & Rogers was founded by political infighter and now Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), and his old partners are now bucking the post-midterm trend of bringing in a Democrat. It’s a counterintuitive strategy that carries obvious risks, not the least being diminished access to the emerging power centers on Capitol Hill. But the firm’s path, which plots a decidedly different course than most other GOP shops in town, also rests on a gamble: that at a time of razor-thin partisan margins in Congress and increasingly complex public policy, what you know can be as important—and lucrative—as who you know. That helps explain why Barbour Griffith & Rogers was signing on a handful of policy experts last year when many Republican-controlled lobbying shops were scooping up key Democratic aides and operatives.
Among the firm’s new hired guns: Stephen Rademaker, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s national policy director; Mary Lacey Reuther, a health care expert from the Bush administration; and Celeste Ward, a military operations and Iraq expert who worked at the Pentagon.
Sure, they are all Republicans, making them easy fits inside the firm. But the firm’s chairman, Ed Rogers, is banking on their depth of knowledge to attract corporations and other interest groups.
By year’s end, Reuther, a former special assistant to Bush’s one-time Medicaid and Medicare director Mark McClellan, was already toiling away on the interests of drug makers Eli Lilly & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb—whose combined payments to the firm amount to $160,000 for six months work, disclosure reports show.
Posted by ladd at 06:46 PM in MS Newspapers, Analysis, National, US Congress | Email this entry
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