White House in Exile

Penn's not the only major player in Hillary's corporate orbit. There's also the Glover Park Group, a fast-rising lobbying and PR firm known as the "White House in Exile" because it's packed with former Clintonites. Its roster includes former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart and deputy chief of staff Joel Johnson. From Hillary's orbit come Peter Kauffman, her former press secretary, and Gigi Georges, her New York director. Campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle used to work there, and until recently so did Howard Wolfson.

Wolfson, a pugnacious operative who's said he admires Karl Rove's skills, took a leave of absence in March (unlike Penn), though he still has a stake in the firm. Partners at Glover Park downplay connections to Hill and Bill, but the association--along with the Democratic takeover of Congress--has been good for business. Glover Park was Washington's fastest-growing private company in 2005. The day before the 2006 election it got a huge infusion of private-equity cash from a firm in Chicago, Svoboda, Collins. Business has doubled since then. No one at Glover Park is now officially part of the Clinton campaign, yet there are plenty of unofficial relationships. Johnson, for example, is giving to and raising money for Hillary. The firm still lobbies her office, as it presumably would a Clinton II White House.

Glover Park's clients have included standard liberal groups like the United Federation of Teachers and the ACLU. Yet the Clinton ties have also helped the firm make an alliance with Rupert Murdoch. Hillary started cozying up to Murdoch after her 2000 Senate victory, in a calculated attempt to defang his conservative media empire, News Corp. In 2004 the billionaire required a favor of his own: Nielsen was preparing to change the way it measured viewership in US TV markets, a plan that Murdoch's Fox network feared would cost it millions in ad revenue. So Murdoch called on Glover Park. Wolfson secured a $200,000 contract and unveiled a PR blitz under the guise of a supposedly independent minority front group called Don't Count Us Out. The group played on fears of voter disenfranchisement, arguing that minorities would be undercounted in the new system. Don't Count Us Out ran more than 100 ads in two days, and Nielsen was deluged with hate mail. Letters of support came in from politicians, including Senator Clinton, who warned, "Nielsen would be remiss in pushing forward with its rollout plan." The campaign eventually fizzled when influential supporters, including Jesse Jackson, realized that Glover Park's claims were bogus and viewers were simply moving from broadcast channels like Fox to cable. Yet Murdoch kept Glover Park on retainer and held a $60,000 fundraiser for Clinton last July. News Corp. executive Peter Chernin is hosting a top-dollar shindig for her in LA in late May. Asked what she thought of Murdoch, Clinton spokesman Phillippe Reines told The New Yorker, "Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he's smart and effective."

News Corp. wasn't an exception for Glover Park. It's used similar tactics on behalf of another frequent Democratic bête noire--the pharmaceutical industry. As with Penn, it's been difficult to tell where business ends and politics begins. In the run-up to passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, Johnson (who partnered with disgraced former Tom DeLay staffers and associates of Jack Abramoff at his previous lobbying job) lobbied for the industry's chief arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). Last summer, as the law came under scrutiny from both liberals and conservatives, he wrote a memo to Hill staffers arguing that "early polls call into question the political value in strongly attacking the weakness in the Medicare prescription drug plan." Johnson failed to note that he was on the industry's payroll, as were other firms whose work he cited. After the election Glover Park inked deals with drugmakers Amgen and Pfizer to block a proposal to lower drug prices under Medicare and help the latter slash 10,000 workers this year and close five manufacturing sites.

Glover Park has also been trying to get liberals to support a program called Medicare Advantage. According to the federally run Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, this privately run plan overcharges the government by 12 percent compared with traditional Medicare. And it paves the way for privatization. As a result, Congressmen like Pete Stark and Charlie Rangel want to redirect some of the money toward children's healthcare. That proposal has drawn fierce resistance from America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which has recruited Glover Park and another Democratic firm, the Dewey Square Group, to argue that cutting benefits to Medicare Advantage would disproportionately hurt low-income and minority enrollees (note a pattern?), a claim the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls "distorted" and "based on misleading use of data." Nevertheless, former Hillary spokesman Peter Kauffman has asked community groups in New York to join a Medicare Advantage minority advisory committee, which now includes former big-city mayors and the NAACP. And Glover Park put out polling, in conjunction with a GOP firm and AHIP, that shows "record high satisfaction" among enrollees, according to Johnson. Hillary was supportive of the Medicare Advantage program during the debate over Medicare but voted against the final bill. She hasn't commented on whether she favors preserving the current system.

Murdoch and PhRMA aren't the only odd couples to enlist the Clintonites. There's also the government of Dubai, which has paid Bill handsomely for speeches and strategic advice. Around the time of the furor over the proposed management of US ports by Dubai Ports World, Glover Park launched a lobbying drive to broker the sale of two US military plants to the government-owned Dubai International Capital. The two New York senators led opposition to the ports deal but didn't raise objections to the plant takeover. According to Newsday, the $100,000 contract was routed through the LA law firm of Raj Tanden, brother of Hillary's top domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden.

Glover Park has also fronted for Verizon to kill "net neutrality" and allow telecom companies to charge more for certain Internet content, for the insurance industry on asbestos claims, for Ernst & Young on immunity from shareholder lawsuits and for the Swift banking coalition's collaboration with the Bush Administration on "antiterror" financial records.

Partners at Glover Park say business is business--if their work puts them at odds with fellow Democrats, so be it. "On some days you're working on the other side of an issue from a Democratic Congressman," says Johnson. "The next day you're helping them raise money." It's a world Hillary knows well.

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