Hey Democrats, is that a Corporate Lobbyist in your pocket?

David Sirota writes on the Huffington Post about the connection between corporate lobbyists and Democrats in Washington. Sirota tells about one lobbyist, J. Jonathon Jones...

"In 2003, Jones played an instrumental role in organizing a regular meeting of Democratic lobbyists and Senate staffers. Every other Monday during the congressional session, 80 to 100 lobbyists and top staffers for Democratic members plotted strategy in a conference room at the Hall of the States near the Capitol...Staffers stopped meeting in 2005 in a reevaluation of the group in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. After the air cleared, the mix of lobbyists and congressional aides started meeting again last fall...Jones's main challenge is to beat back the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party and to help craft legislation that businesses can stomach."

Barack Obama has positioned himself as a reformer on government ethics and the influence of lobbyists. Tom Daschle says that Obama" has become a real expert on ethics in government, restoring integrity to the (governmental) institutions.” Unfortunately, Obama is isn't totally clean on this issue.

When Obama declared his presidential candidacy in February, he said he would re-engage Americans disenchanted with business-as-usual in Washington who had turned away from politics...One of the lobbyists, who supports Clinton, said that Shomik Dutta, a fundraiser for Obama's campaign, called to ask if the lobbyist's wife would be interested in making a political contribution.

Sirota says that the influence of corporate lobbyists is so obvious that the lobbyists no longer care if their arguments for policy make any sense at all.

K Street doesn't feel the need to be publicly consistent: Because when you can buy off congressional staffers, when you can create corporate front groups under the guise of "helping Democrats," when you can get even the supposed "anti-lobbyist" presidential candidate to bow down to lobbyists, there's no need to bother with annoying things like consistency or the truth.

Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1990's because they were talking out of both sides of their mouths. They said they supported the middle class, the working family, and labor, but then went and did something else. It didn't take long for the American people to question what Democrats stood for because it seemed that Democrats didn't stand for anything. Now that Democrats have control of Congress, it is disappointing some Democrats are going back to their old ways.