White House visitor logs dumped late in the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve show that Billy Tauzin, the top lobbyist for the prescription drug industry and once a favorite target of Barack Obama, visited the White House at least 11 times in Obama's first six months in office.
The White House's open door for Tauzin, whom candidate Obama attacked as the embodiment of the revolving door and the corrupt collusion between politicians and industry, further dismantles the myth of Obama as the scourge of special interests. It also bolsters the conclusion that health care "reform" has become a boondoggle for the health industry, especially pharmaceutical companies.
During the presidential primary, in the spring of 2008, Obama ran a campaign ad aimed directly at Tauzin, chief executive officer of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In the ad, titled "Billy," Obama tells a small gathering of seniors:
"The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that. That's an example of the same old game-playing in Washington. I don't want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing."
But Obama has played the game, and Tauzin was one of the first players he picked for his team. White House visitor logs show that between Feb. 4 and July 22, Tauzin visited his office an average of once every 15 days -- about as frequently as Tauzin probably collects that generous paycheck candidate Obama derided. We don't know how often Tauzin visited after July, because of the ad hoc nature of White House visitor log releases.
They made a campaign ad called "Billy" against lobbyist power and then they immediately invited "Billy" to practically move into the White House? What in the hell were they thinking?
The Republicans are going to have a field day with this and I'm hard pressed to argue with them. It's true that they are total hypocrites on this issue -- but then, so are the Democrats. In more ways than one. Perhaps you recall this odd decision last June:
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.
Obviously, they relented and agreed to release the logs --- sort of. But I think we can now see the real reason they might not have wanted to do it.
Aside from the policy implications, which we already had to swallow, the political problem the Democrats have bought for themselves with this are huge. It would be different if Obama hadn't explicitly run on a clean government platform and if the Republicans weren't blatantly hypocritical opportunists. But he did and they are and this is powerful mojo that plays into the hands of the tea partiers and Republicans.
I can't get over the administration's sheer political malpractice in handling this populist mood in the country. I don't know if they all convinced themselves that they were political magicians and therefore the rules don't apply to them or what, but Democrats should have known that after having turned the phrase "culture of corruption" into their mantra, they would be particularly vulnerable to appearances of impropriety (not to mention actual impropriety.) Bad, bad move.