Carter Eskew and Democratic K-Street Culture

huffington post ^ | june 18, 2006 | Matt Stoller

[bitt]

"This Lieberman-Lamont race is becoming exceptionally important, because it's the most high-profile of a series of clashes between two different ways of doing politics. The bear ad, and the ad man named Carter Eskew who is the consultant behind it, unwittingly reveals a lot about what's going on in both DC and in Connecticut. Looking into how Carter Eskew does business will illustrate the stakes of the Lamont-Lieberman fight. Eskew isn't just your every day ad man; he's a partner at the Glover Park Group, a high profile lobbying and communications shop in DC that includes him and ex-Clintonites such as Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson. This firm does a fair amount of business, and it is extraordinarily well-known in this town. And while I don't want to point fingers, there's sometimes a sort of ethical flexibility about the lobbying work they do.

snip...

...."So that's what we're dealing with, a group of people who believe in an outdated machine politics. For twenty years, there was no conflict between being a Democrat and being a corporatist. Today, there is, and in the case of Lieberman and his lobbyists/consultants, it's producing excessive greed and disloyalty. Lieberman's refusal to rule out running as an independent, Chuck Schumer's noise that he might support an independent bid, and McCurry's work for the telecoms are all part of this. And in Carter Eskew, you can see this at work in real time."

[bitt]

" Now, to be clear, working in politics and then lobbying politicians is not in itself a bad thing, but you do have to be careful about the ethics involved in trading on these relationships. In today's DC culture, this revolving door is so commonplace and so normal that K-Street Dems pretend like ethics are just not relevant anymore. That's just a dated attitude. So if the bear ad seems out of place, it's because Eskew believes that we are still in the 1980s in the midst of the Reagan Revolution, or the 1990s, during the Clinton era. He is part of the machine that produced a profitable niche for all sorts of lobbyists and single issue groups, and an easy path for Democratic politicians who could play the single issue scorecard game without actually moving a progressive agenda. It was quite the nice racket."

interesting tid-bits here, and a good video of Joe Lieberman's commercial....