Lobbyist Line Up To Sabotage Obama and We, The People

By BRODY MULLINS and SCOTT KILMAN

WASHINGTON -- Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.

The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.

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"What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed," former CEO Richard Scott said Wednesday, after announcing the creation of Conservatives for Patients Rights.

Now that's a real joke, Mr. Scott. What you really mean is conservative patient rights for the wealthy.

Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda -- ranging from expanding health-care coverage to cutting farm subsidies to cutting wasteful defense projects -- touches almost every part of the U.S. economy. It threatens to disrupt the business models of a broad swath of America's biggest companies.

Opinion polls indicate that Mr. Obama's broad goals enjoy popular support. But crucial details of the president's agenda will be decided in coming months by close-in legislative fighting, where big industries and the members of Congress that support them have plenty of clout. At the same time, threatened interests are gearing up to shape the coming debates with multimillion-dollar public-relations and lobbying campaigns.

(So when the price of everything goes up, we can thank the multimillion dollar lobbying P.R. campaigns. These CEO types really have no clue about how the people feel right now. Their "fear-campaigns" aren't likely to work this time, as they expect them to. Sooner or later, fear turns to anger. It's already happening and has been for some time, from what we are hearing. What's more, unlike during the Clinton administration, a greater mass of people know who is to blame for the nightmare in which we find ourselves.

Politicians would be well advised not to get involved with these greedy monsters on the now dangerous trail they tread.)

The agriculture lobby quickly recoiled Wednesday against President Obama's vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," though industry leaders and farm-state legislators weren't sure which government payments they'll have to defend.

"We were surprised President Obama included farm payments in his speech," said Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "But it is Congress where the rubber meets the road."

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Washington's K Street is a popular address for the nation's lobbying groups.

A plunge in commodity grain prices since last summer is shrinking profits across the farm sector, making it even more politically dicey for farm-state legislators to go along with any cuts in federal aid. Earlier this month, the U.S. Agriculture Department predicted that U.S. net farm income, a rough measure of profitability, will drop 20% this year to $71.2 billion from last year's record-high $89.3 billion.

The line in the president's speech about agribusiness seemed to merge two distinct ideas for overhauling subsidies. While the president didn't define "large agribusinesses," he favored as a presidential candidate limiting the amount of federal subsidies an individual grower can receive to $250,000, an idea that is included on the rural agenda of the White House Web site. The Senate voted down such a proposal as recently as December 2007.

The other idea floating around Washington is to scrap a type of subsidy check called the "fixed direct payment," which since 1996 has put about $68 billion into the pockets of growers. According to farm lobbyists, Tom Vilsack, the newly minted agriculture secretary, has been telling farm trade groups in recent weeks that fixed direct payments have outlived their usefulness.

Tom Vilsack

Meanwhile, an alliance of electric utilities, coal and mining companies said it will spend as much as $40 million to make sure Congress approves a global-warming plan with funding for technology to reduce emissions that includes carbon capture and storage at coal-fired plants. In his speech, Mr. Obama called for a $15 billion-a-year investment in clean-energy sources, including clean coal.

Joe Lucas, a senior vice president of communications for the industry coalition, says the industry is "winning the public-policy debate," but will continue funding advertisements in order to "continue to be out there in the public dialogue."

Even before Mr. Obama's speech, the defense industry had stepped up its advertising and lobbying efforts this week in response to the president's vow to crack down on defense-project cost overruns, and to separate proposals in Congress to cut off certain expensive weapons programs. Mr. Obama's criticism, industry officials fear, is a foreshadowing of deep cuts to come.

(The defense industry has been one of the biggest wasters of money in the U.S. for years. We all remember the $400.00 toilet seats and $99.00 hammers in the '80s. Nothing has changed, but it is about to.)

The Aerospace Industries Association of America has spent $2 million so far on an ad campaign urging that defense spending shouldn't be slashed to offset shortfalls in other areas.

Boeing Co. announced Wednesday new players in its Washington team, including a new top lobbyist, David H. Morrison, who hails from powerhouse firm Podesta Group.

(Podesta, eh? Some how, I think this just may prove our point, that seeing the nation in terms of Democrat and Republican is a false duality and a huge distraction from what's really going on.)

Defense companies have a wind at their back: the jobs they create, and the congressional support that goes with them. That could provide a boost to Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-22 Raptor, the Air Force's most advanced fighter, whose production line will have to begin shutting down if more jets aren't ordered soon.

Lockheed is mobilizing grass-roots Web efforts and traditional lobbying to keep the plane going, and the Air Force will ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates for more planes. But it's still not clear whether he will allocate money for more of the $143 million jets, which have been faulted for their high cost and for their origin as a Cold War-era system.

—Elizabeth Williamson and August Cole contributed to this article.

Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com and Scott Kilman at scott.kilman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4

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