War and peace

Last Friday, big news emanated from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

But you probably didn’t see much about it, as reporters rushed to file stories about President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize instead.

Overshadowed by Oslo were the president’s pointed remarks in support of financial regulatory reform. Obama called out the Washington special interests fiercely resisting efforts to make big banks more accountable to American consumers. Specifically, Obama rebuked the nation’s corporate lobby for working to block the creation of his Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

“[T]he U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending millions on an ad campaign to kill it,” he said. “You might have seen some of these ads — the ones that claim that local butchers and other small businesses somehow will be harmed by this agency. This is, of course, completely false — and we’ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency. I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services.”

The special interests weren’t laughing. Leveling the playing field for ordinary Americans is precisely the kind of change they feared Obama would bring to the Washington game they had mastered for so many years.

And the Chamber wasn’t alone.

This week, big insurance companies — sensing how much momentum the president’s healthcare reform effort had generated — also came out swinging.

The industry’s lobbying arm, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), started airing a seven-figure television ad campaign to fight new rules barring their ability to deny coverage to Americans due to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to cap what they charged patients out-of-pocket; and lifting the limits of the coverage they permit in a given year or a lifetime.

Just like the Chamber’s meat-cutter myth-making, Big Insurance wants to deceive Americans into thinking a curb on health-industry profits could harm seniors’ Medicare benefits, or force higher premiums on those who have coverage through their employer.
Hogwash.

This summer, the nonpartisan FactCheck.org reported that “the claim that Obama and Congress are cutting seniors’ Medicare benefits to pay for the healthcare overhaul is outright false, though that doesn’t keep it from being repeated ad infinitum.”

And those alleged premium hikes? Even the folks who conducted the report cited (and financed) by the insurance industry — PricewaterhouseCoopers — said its findings were being used to mislead Americans. As FactCheck.org declared: “It makes for a pretty easy day of fact-checking when the very authors of a less-than-thorough analysis of a bill come out and say, you know, that study wasn’t exactly thorough. And we didn’t pay them to say that.”

It’s been a rough autumn for the Chamber.

This week, Mother Jones exposed the corporate lobby’s outrageous inflation of its membership. In testimony to Congress, the Chamber claimed it represents “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors and regions.” A day later, the group issued a press release admitting that the real number was more like 300,000 — or about 10 percent of its original boast.

The Chamber’s figure-fudging couldn’t come at a worse time, as the number of businesses ditching the trade association grows larger each month.

Apple, the latest defector, “supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort,” a company vice president wrote Chamber chief Tom Donohue.

Frustrating, yes. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Washington special interests have a long history of intensely resisting efforts to un-rig the system that serves them so well.

In announcing his presidential campaign nearly three years ago, Barack Obama pointed to that insider influence as a central component of the politics he sought to change.

“The cynics and the lobbyists and the special interests [have] turned our government into a game only they can afford to play,” he said. “They think they own this government, but we’re here today to take it back.”

For those who thought his words were merely a vehicle for launching a national campaign, Obama’s actions as president should serve as notice. His Nobel Peace Prize may have been a surprise. But his war on business-as-usual in Washington is far from it.

Del Cecato is a partner at AKPD Message and Media, the political consulting firm founded by David Axelrod in 1985. He served as media adviser and admaker for Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008.

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