Bill Daley has long history as lobbyist
Published
September 25, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times
BY CAROL FELSENTHAL
According
to Michael Sneed in Tuesday’s Chicago Sun-Times, mayoral
brother William “Bill” Daley is “steamed”
over a new John McCain ad that blasts Barack Obama by linking
him to supposed Obama buddies, “convicted felon”
Tony Rezko, Gov. Blagojevich, who carries “a legacy
of federal and state investigations,” as well as Illinois
Senate President Emil Jones Jr. (“under ethical cloud”).
But first on the list of sinister associations — even
before “his money man” Rezko — is Obama’s
“economic adviser,” who the voice on the ad
tells us is not only the “mayor’s brother,”
but also one of those creatures so prevalent in Mc-Cain’s
upper echelon — a “lobbyist.”
The ad seems sleazy and unfair — although none other
than the New York Times, which McCain campaign senior adviser
Steve Schmidt declared is “completely, totally, 150
percent in the tank for” Obama, fact-checked it and,
under “accuracy,” declared that it contains
“nothing that is outright wrong.”
Bill Daley vehemently disagrees, calling the ad “an
outright lie.” He told Sneed that not only is he offended
by being tied to Rezko — the ad makes “it look
like I’m a thief and a gangster like Rezko”
— but he objects to being called “a lobbyist.”
“I’ve never been a lobbyist! My son, Bill was
a lobbyist five years ago.”
In 2005, I published a profile of Bill Daley in Chicago
magazine, where I’m a contributing editor. I looked
back at my research and at various drafts of the article
and here’s what I found.
Hired to build lobbying practice
In late 1984, Daley, a John Marshall Law School graduate,
was offered a partnership at Mayer, Brown & Platt. He
was hired to help build the lobbying practice at the firm,
which barely had one in its Washington office, much less
in its Chicago headquarters. His father was dead; his brother
was not yet mayor — but his being a favorite of then-congressman
Dan Rostenkowski, the man who was writing the nation’s
tax laws — made him an attractive addition to a firm
that did not hire many John Marshall graduates.
“Bill did represent clients before Rostenkowski and
other members of the Congress, as well as before the White
House,” one Mayer, Brown partner told me at the time.
In the mid- to late ’80s, according to another Mayer,
Brown partner, Daley’s practice “involved mostly
tax lobbying . . . with Rostenkowski. Bill was in Washington
almost all the time.”
He took a leave of absence from Mayer to become President
Bill Clinton’s “NAFTA czar,” steamrolling
the North American Free Trade Agreement through a reluctant
Congress in Clinton’s first term. Daley’s friendship
with Rostenkowski, an avid free trader, again helped. Organized
labor opposed the trade treaty, negotiated by the first
President Bush with Canada and Mexico, for fear that the
United States would lose low-wage manufacturing jobs to
Mexico. Although the press celebrated Bill Daley for helping
a president who had so recently humiliated him — Clinton
seemed to have promised Daley a Cabinet position; there
was all kinds of press predicting it, and then he was passed
over — a former law partner had a less lofty view:
“NAFTA was a way for Bill Daley to get into the game,
pick up chits.”
According to a writer for the Tribune Magazine, Clinton,
distracted by a rough start to his first term, was so pessimistic
about passing NAFTA that he dubbed it “the Lazarus
Project.”
“Nobody wanted to touch NAFTA,” Rahm Emanuel
told me at the time. When I interviewed Al Gore, he assigned
Daley “virtually 100 percent of the credit. . . .
Nobody thought that we could get [NAFTA], but he was able
to pull it out of the bag.”
‘They called me the czar’
“They called me the czar,” Bill Daley chuckled
during one of my interviews with him. They also called him
the dealmaker.
“We had it won until the last week and half,”
recalled anti-NAFTA crusader David Bonior, the former congressman
from Michigan who led the opposition to NAFTA in the House.
Bonior cited “two or three dozen members of Congress,
[who] if they don’t have passion one way or the other,
they stay neutral and get the best deal.”
Bonior explained that each was trying to get something
— a bridge, a change in the treaty “to reflect
some economic situation in their district. We didn’t
have anything to give.” The administration had plenty
to give and, Bonior charged, passed out $20 billion in goodies.
Daley was able to win NAFTA, writer and political strategist
Don Rose told me, because of his “ability to find
everybody’s price.”
In 2001, in the wake of the Gore fiasco — Bill Daley
was chairman of Gore’s campaign — Daley, who
finally got his Cabinet post in the second Clinton term,
went to work for SBC Chairman Ed Whitacre. Whitacre had
befriended Bill Daley while he was commerce secretary. As
chairman of the highly regulated company, Whitacre needed
help in making his case. He hired Daley, fancy title and
job description aside, to lobby, to “grease the skids
with regulators and politicians,” in the words of
one reporter who covers the industry. (SBC was regulated
in 13 states and also by the FCC in Washington.) Daley’s
job was to lobby the FCC to ease regulations, to lobby politicians
to write telecom laws more friendly to former Baby Bell
monopolies like SBC, to end federal government rules forcing
SBC to lease access to its local wires, at cut rates, to
competitors such as AT&T and MCI. Daley’s Midwest
clout, particularly in Illinois, a key market for SBC, multiplied
his value to Whitacre.
As for Bill Daley’s son, Bill Jr., yes he was a lobbyist,
for Fannie Mae, on whose board his father once sat.
‘A big, fat, no-sweat bone’
In the wake of the Cabinet appointment that never materialized,
the new president called Bill the father to Washington to
play golf. Clinton gave Bill Daley senior a seat on the
Fannie Mae board, which included a stock option plan. Jim
Johnson, one of Daley’s closest friends, was then
chairman.
“It looks like a big, fat, no-sweat bone thrown his
way,” wrote James Warren, then at the Chicago Tribune.
Daley also successfully approached executives at the government-financed
mortgage giant about sending some of its securities work
to Mayer, Brown. “Whether I was on the board or whether
I knew somebody,” Bill Daley was quoted in the Tribune
as saying, “Fannie Mae would not have hired Mayer,
Brown & Platt unless the firm was competent in securities
matters.”
Back to Bill Daley Jr. One Chicago journalist told me at
the time that “Billy,” who has an MBA from Northwestern
and who started in Fannie Mae’s Chicago office before
earning a transfer to the Washington headquarters and the
title of vice president, is “nice and capable, but
there are lots of nice and capable young people around.
If his name were Billy Jones he certainly would not have
that job.” If the name Jim Johnson sounds familiar,
it’s because he was briefly head of Obama’s
vice presidential vetting committee; Johnson stepped down
because, in part, of the press ruckus over his past ties
to Fannie Mae.
There has been some debate since the ad came out about
whether Bill Daley is a lobbyist. On Wednesday, his brother
the mayor insisted otherwise.
I do believe that Bill Daley has worked as a lobbyist.
Is it fair to link him to Rezko, Blagojevich and Jones?
No, definitely not. Is it fair to describe Bill Daley as
a lobbyist? Yes, although “former lobbyist”
would have been more accurate.
Carol Felsenthal is a Chicago writer.
Biden's History of Lies and Lifted Quotes
Published August 26, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times
Recommend (15)
BY CAROL FELSENTHAL
I wonder whether Barack Obama’s vetters, Caroline
Kennedy and Eric Holder, knew what they were doing when
they settled on Joe Biden. Journalists and McCain opposition
researchers must be logging onto Nexis and searching 1987-1988
using the key words “Biden and plagiarism.”
There is a feast of material that would make even the most
partisan Obama backer question the wisdom of this choice.
Biden, then 44, was forced out of the 1988 presidential
race — he officially dropped out on Sept. 23, 1987
— just when his candidacy seemed to be taking off
in Iowa, the all-important first caucus, and just as he
seemed to be gaining on Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee.
A Dukakis staffer noticed and fed to Maureen Dowd, then
a New York Times reporter rather than columnist, that Biden
had lifted almost verbatim his closing remarks at a debate
at the Iowa state fairgrounds in August 1987. The lines
were lifted from a passionate speech delivered by British
Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Here’s Kinnock: “Why am I the first Kinnock
in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?
. . . Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Was
it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight
hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?
. . . It was because there was no platform upon which they
could stand.’’
Not only did Biden not credit Kinnock, he fooled his audience
by using the classic liar’s technique of burnishing
a lie with detail: “I started thinking as I was coming
over here, ‘Why is it that Joe Biden’s the first
in his family ever to go to a university? Is it because
our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because
they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in
the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come
up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?. . .
It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon
which to stand.’’
Biden was not the first member of his family to go to college,
and the closest his ancestors came to a coal mine was a
grandfather who was a mining engineer.
Stealing from RFK
Once Dowd broke that story on the front page of the Times
on Sept. 12, 1987, it spread quickly through newspapers,
magazines, radio and television. The dam holding back Biden’s
exaggerations and penchant for lifting words from others
broke, and he nearly drowned in his own deceit.
Biden also lifted words from Bobby Kennedy’s speeches
— paragraphs that political junkies prized so much
they knew them by heart.
Here’s RFK: “Few will have the greatness to
bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a
small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts
will be written the history of this generation.’’
Here’s Joe Biden: “Well, few of us have the
greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can act
to affect a small portion of events, and in the totality
of these acts will be written the history of this generation.’’
Bobby Kennedy: “The gross national product does not
allow for the health of our children, the quality of their
education or the joy of their play. It does not include
the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages,
the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of
our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our
courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country.
It measures everything, in short, except that which makes
life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America
except why we are proud that we are Americans.’’
Here’s Joe Biden: “‘We cannot measure
the health of our children, the quality of their education,
the joy of their play. . . . It doesn’t measure the
beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the
intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our
public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom,
neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country.
. . . That bottom line can tell us everything about our
lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can
tell us everything about America except that which makes
us proud to be Americans.’’
Biden said at the time that RFK was “the man who
I guess I admire more than anyone else in American politics.”
No doubt about that.
Anyone following the primary campaign in 1987 could see
there was something eating at Joe Biden. He needed desperately
for people to see him as the smartest guy in the room, and
that, coupled with his hot temper and surging insecurities,
resulted in the following exchange, which was captured on
C-SPAN. Although more than 20 years old, it will no doubt
find its way into political advertising.
‘I have a much higher IQ’
On April 3, 1987, at a campaign stop in Claremont, N.H.,
a voter named Frank innocently asked Biden what law school
he attended and how he performed there.
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you do,”
replied Biden, who went to Syracuse University College of
Law. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship.”
He told the astonished man that while he admittedly did
not do well his first year because he didn’t want
to be in law school, he did much better his second and third
years and ended up in the top half of his class. “I
won the international moot court competition.”
Without being asked, Biden then boasted about his performance
in college, at the University of Delaware, telling Frank
that he had been named the “outstanding student in
the political-science department. . . . I graduated with
three degrees from college. . . . And I’d be delighted
to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,
Frank.”
There were a number of lies in this outburst and it was
not long before they too were enumerated:
• Biden got in trouble in 1965, during his first
year in law school. He wrote a paper in which he lifted
five pages verbatim from the Fordham Law Review. He was
given an “F” in the course. He managed to avoid
being bounced from law school, retook the course and earned
a B.
• He claimed that he was “the only one in my
class to have a full academic scholarship.” He didn’t.
He did have a half scholarship that was need-based.
• He did not graduate from law school in the top
half of his class. He graduated 76th out of 85 — and
he was near the bottom of his class all three years.
• If he won the moot court competition — and
he claimed at the time that he actually did — he did
not put it on his resume, surprising for a man prone to
so egregiously exaggerating his accomplishments.
• He did not win the award for being the outstanding
student in the political science department at Delaware,
and he graduated with one degree, not three. He had a “C”
average and graduated 506th in a class of 688.
At the time, he told a reporter, “I exaggerate when
I’m angry.”
There are other weird outbursts by Biden in more recent
years, grandstanding questions to Supreme Court nominees
in which it’s impossible to find the question, but
not hard to find all kinds of personal information about
the senator from Delaware.
One example comes from Samuel Alito’s confirmation
hearing in 2006. When it was Biden’s turn to question
Alito, he mentioned that his daughter had applied or been
accepted — not clear which in Biden’s ramblings
— to graduate school at Princeton, but decided instead
to go to the University of Pennsylvania. Biden showed up
at the hearing wearing a Princeton hat. Keith Olbermann
asked, “Will the hat hurt his hair plugs?”
And that leads to the easy warning that I’ve been
telling friends for years, “Never trust a man who
gets hair plugs.” The insecurity is right there in
the peculiar set of his hair — for all to see. Apparently
Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder missed it.
Carol Felsenthal is a columnist for the Chicago Daily
Observer, where this essay was posted.
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