Obama's Perception As 'Dictator' Cost GOP Lobby Shop Cash, Says Founder
Source: huffingtonpost
WASHINGTON -- A top Republican lobbying shop lost major business over the past few years because clients thought "Obama was going to be dictator," and only firms closely aligned with the administration would have access, Ed Rogers, the head of BGR Group, said in a deposition taken in January.
BGR Group, founded by top Republican players Haley Barbour, Lanny Griffith and Rogers, peaked in 2007 with more than $20 million in revenue. In three years of the Obama administration, revenue has been down roughly 25 percent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Barbour returned to the firm in 2012 after two terms as Mississippi governor.
"There was a spike in people thinking that Obama was going to be dictator and to get a fair hearing, which is all you're ever really going to get or all you literally want, you had to be close to the Obama administration. We were not," Rogers testified.
"Well, was that just a perception or is that reality?" he was asked.
"It's a perception more than anything. Washington is becoming a town of what you know, not who you know," Rogers said.
Jeffrey Birnbaum, a spokesman for BGR Group, declined to comment.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/obama-lobbying-dictator-gop-lobbyist_n_1474492.html?ref=politics
freshwest
(53,661 posts)That's the way it is supposed to be, not a din of thieves passing out money to their cronies like Bush did.
AndyTiedye
(23,500 posts)AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)... not of Earth.
yellowcanine
(35,703 posts)patrice
(47,992 posts)People talk as though being a centrist is sooooooooooooo easy. Ha!!
Alcibiades
(5,061 posts)You don't lobby the people who don't have the votes.
No Republican on K Street has any right to say a damn thing about how their lobbying profits are down. Even conservatives hate you assholes.
MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)They have their box and they only think inside of it.
nxylas
(6,440 posts)Obama is like Hitler! He's like Stalin! At least that's what the GOP has been telling everybody. And now they've lost a shedload of money because people believed them. Karma's a bitch.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)I can't wait for the day that the Koch brothers and their ilk realized that all their carefully planned power grab, slowly implemented over decades suddenly gets snatched from them by the very vicissitudes of life, leaving them grasping at useless thin air. I can already hear them howling from the pits of Hell.
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)BumRushDaShow
(129,891 posts)because of pure, unadulterated racism. But as Nelson was wont to say -
Enrique
(27,461 posts)but I don't see anything newsworthy in this story. It's just the sensationalism of the word "dictator" seeming to be applied to Obama. This is just a comment about his income from a divorce case.
Huff Po has become all about the page views, they should get a bunch from this.