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Al
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October 23, 2000
Flacking for Gore
Katie's New Gig
Early this spring a troop of second-tier DC lobbyists
and Democratic Party bureaucrats gathered a few blocks down Pennsylvania
Avenue from the White House at the law offices of Holland and
Knight. They were part of a team assigned to the desperate mission
of finding some way to salvage Al Gore's sundering campaign.
This particular session plotted the creation of an ad hoc group
to flack for the Veep on green matters. They agreed to call themselves
Environmentalists for Gore.
Oddly, there were
no full-time environmentalists in the room. Odder still was the
location of the meeting. Holland and Knight is not regarded as
one of the do-gooder lobby shops on the Hill. Instead, it's roster
of clients include such major air polluters as Northern States
Power, Teco Energy and Tampa Electric, prime Everglades destroyer
South Florida Water Water Management District, various trade
associations for companies that generate hazardous waste (Asphalt
Emulsion Manufacturer's Association National Paint and Coatings
Association), Clorox, Consortium for Biotech Research, Superfund
Action Alliance (a group of waste producers seeking to undermine
Superfund) and what is widely regarded as the most viciously
anti-environmental outfit in Washington, the Chemical Manufacturers
Association.
If the site of
this session might raise eyebrows, one of the key organizers
of the event certainly wouldn't. Her name is Kathleen Alana McGinty,
Gore's long-time aide, who has returned from a two year stint
in India just in time to help massage one of Gore's most pissed
off constituencies.
There are few people
closer to Gore than McGinty, one of only two staffers permitted
to call the Veep "Al." The other is Gore's hawkish
national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, who many predict will
be Gore's choice as CIA director if he is elected president.
McGinty grew up
in Philadelphia, the daughter of an Irish-American cop in Frank
Rizzo's police force. She got a degree in chemistry at St. Joseph's
University and soon went to work for ARCO, the oil/chemical giant.
A few years later McGinty pursued a law degree from Columbia
in the Science, Law and Technology program. Before joining Gore's
Senate staff, McGinty did a stint in DC as a lobbyist for the
American Chemical Society, where she fine-tuned the kind of techno-speak
that Gore finds irresistable in a staffer. In answering a reporters'
question about her favorite hobbies, McGinty once said: "Hiking
and reading books on civic realization." It was a response
only Gore could find endearing. McGinty became Gore's top environmental
aide in 1990, helped him research Earth in the Balance and accompanied
him to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
In 1993, McGinty,
then only 29, was tapped to head the White House Office of Environmental
Policy, a newly created panel that Gore pushed for to give him
more of a presence inside the White House. The move didn't sit
well with members of congress or some Clinton staffers who felt
Gore was grasping too much power, including chief of staff Mack
McLarty, Harold Ickes and Hillary. Ultimately, the office was
merged with the Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees
compliance with environmental laws by federal agencies. McGinty
was named as its chair.
The next three
years where bleak ones for environmentalists, as Clinton and
Gore retreated from one campaign pledge after another, from granting
a permit to the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool,
Ohio to a deal with sugar barons in the Everglades to the resumption
of logging in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, culminating
in the Salvage Logging Rider, which exempted timber sales on
national forest lands from compliance with all federal environmental
laws.
"Katie seemed
out of the loop most of the time she was there," a seasoned
environmental lobbyist told CounterPunch. "Or that's how
she made you feel. Katie's great talent was to seduce you on
the phone. She made you feel as if she was your best friend,
a secret Earth First!er, who was shocked and pained when the
inevitable betrayals came. Katie never delivered bad news herself,
but she was always there to console us. She was very, very adroit
at soothing irate enviros, calming them down so that they wouldn't
attack the administration."
At the height of
the budget negotiations in 1998, McGinty shocked many in DC when
she abruptly announced that she was resigning from her post and
was moving to India to take a job at the Tata Research Institute
in New Delhi, India. TERI is an obscure sustainable development
group that receives funding from the UN and works on energy,
biotech and forestry issues. McGinty's husband, Karl Hausker,
an employee of the CIA-linked Center for Strategic and International
Studies, was assigned to India. Many thought McGinty would stay
in DC, where her power in the administration would increase as
the 2000 election approached. But apparently Tipper Gore convinced
McGinty that she should follow her man.
Tipper has taken
an unusual interest in McGinty's personal life. In 1995, Tipper
learned that McGinty had repeatedly postponed her marriage to
Hausker citing the "crushing workload" that kept her
tied down at the White House. Tipper intervened, handled the
wedding arrangements and shipped the newlyweds off on a month-long
honeymoon to Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the rainforests
of Papua, New Guinea.
McGinty returned
to the states in this winter. It didn't take her long to find
a job. Not with the Gore campaign, but as the legislative affairs
director of Troutman Sanders, a notorious DC law firm with a
reputation for defending the worst corporate polluters and using
its lobbying might to carve up environmental legislation. One
of the firm's star litigators, Daniel Reinhardt, successfully
defended Mobil Oil Company in one of the first cases involving
leaking underground gas storage tanks. Reinardt has also been
retained on various matters by the Georgia Power Company defending
it, as Reihnhardt notes in his bio, "in matters as diverse
as alleged negligence in connection with electrocution injuries
and death to alleged property damage to crops as a result of
early defoliation allegedly caused by emissions from Georgia
Power Company facilities." Then there is Eric Szweda, who
boasts of "defending a client against a Clean Water Act
citizen suit brought by the Sierra Club in the Middle District
of Georgia" over "alleged violations of industrial
waste water permit limits for thermal discharges." Szweda
also claims that he "achieved dismissal of a client from
a class action lawsuit comprised of landowners adjacent to Georgia's
most high profile Superfund site."
But Troutman Sanders'
real expertise in DC comes in the area of energy. It represents
a suite of utilities and power companies seeking to deregulate
the nation's electricity market, including the Allliance for
Power Privatization, Boston Edison, Edison Electric Institute,
Minnesota Power and PG&E. The firm has been a fearsome foe
new air quality standards (many imposed by the EPA when McGinty
was at the CEQ) and the Kyoto protocol on global warming, an
already weak treaty that McGinty helped negotiate. McGinty was
recruited to Troutman Sanders by Thomas Jensen, who had worked
under McGinty at the CEQ from 1995 through 1997, where he was
the Associate Director for Natural Resources. Since joining Troutman
Sanders in 1997, Jensen's resume boasts that he has provided
"strategic advice" on global climate policy to big
energy firms, counseled an oil pipeline company on Endangered
Species Act "litigation and related advocacy", assisted
an "air emissions broker" in international pollution
credit transactions, and advised a railroad company on NEPA compliance
regarding the location of its "intermodal transit facility."
Still Troutman
Sanders isn't what you'd call a Democratic law firm. A search
of the FEC database relieved that members of the law firm have
doled out more than $50,000 in the last year. Of that amount
$11,000 went to George W. Bush and $5,000 to Tom DeLay's Keep
Our Majority PAC. In all, the firm gave less than $3,000 to Democrats,
$1,000 to Gore, $1,000 to his nemesis Bill Bradley and $750 to
Senator Max Cleland of Georgia.
But none of this
should be reason to question Katie's true loyalty. "There
would be no higher priority I would have," McGinty said,
"than to help or serve Al Gore." CP
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