Politico reports that the Obama Administration cut a secret deal with industry and business groups for a massive ad campaign supporting health care reform. See their work product above.

Working with your friends to garner support for a policy is message management 101. But the deal to put corporate money behind a pro-health care reform campaign raises two interesting questions.

First, it flies in the face of President Obama’s campaign promise to change things in Washington and make government more transparent. He apparently has made secret deals with the very lobbyists he promised to banish from White House influence.

Second, and more important, it raises questions about the relationship between public officials and lobby groups. The business groups involved certainly were potential opponents to the Obama health care plan. What did they get out of the deal?

Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said he is troubled:

“What you’ve had was the Senate and the White House sitting down and cutting deals with special interests,” he said. “I don’t think that’s quite what the American people signed up for when the Obama campaign said that they were going to limit the influence of special interests in this White House.”

Players in the deal deny any impropriety. But with governmental ethics, it is not only the propriety of a situation, but the appearance of impropriety.  Leroy Towns

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Congress, Ethics, Government, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.