THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 4, 1996 TAG: 9610030003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 60 lines
Two disgraced former aides to U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb are partners in a Washington lobbying firm that specializes in misleading the public and recently hit a new ethics low, even by Washington standards.
The former aides are David K. McCloud, who was Governor Robb's chief of staff before serving on Robb's Senate staff, and Bobby Watson, also a former Democratic National Committee chief of staff.
In 1991, both resigned from Senator Robb's staff and pleaded guilty to charges involving disclosure of a 1988 taped cellular telephone conversation of L. Douglas Wilder, with whom Robb was feuding.
McCloud and Watson now are partners in the lobbying firm State Affairs Co., which specializes in state-level public relations and grass-roots lobbying. According to its brochure, the firm prides itself on its ability to ``remain anonymous.''
Companies hire a firm like State Affairs to create ``grass-roots'' citizen coalitions whose members call or write elected officials in support of the companies' positions. The idea is to make the calls and letters seem spontaneous, when in fact they are orchestrated by the lobbying firm.
State Affairs apparently broke new ground, or more accurately, slunk to lower ground, when it created a purportedly nonpartisan campaign-watchdog group called Contributors Watch. Secretly working for Philip Morris and other tobacco clients, Contributors Watch conducted a study of trial lawyers' millions of dollars of political contributions.
Contributors Watch then released the study, representing it as nonpartisan research.
As The Washington Post reported Monday, ``Trial lawyers and big businesses, such as the tobacco industry, are at war in many states over efforts by business interests to change state laws to help shield them from liability suits.''
Thus it was in tobacco's interest to attack trial lawyers - but the attack would be more forceful if no one knew tobacco was behind it.
``Of all the outrageous and unbelievable things that happen in Washington, this one takes the cake,'' said Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics, whose funding comes from foundations and is disclosed. ``Posing as a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization to be unveiled as nothing but a special-interest tool is really the bottom line of gall.''
Contributions Watch is not legally required to disclose the sources of its funding because it's a nonprofit, tax-exempt group.
``What's wrong is that they are presenting themselves as something they are not, and they are not telling us what they are,'' said University of Miami law professor Frances Hill, an expert on nonprofit groups.
The Contributions Watch study of trial lawyers' political contributions was the subject of long articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard - just the kind of response the tobacco industry hoped for and would not have gotten if it had been identified as the source of funds for the research.
Some form of protest is called for. We suggest that smokers stop smoking and nonsmokers never start.
And remember, the more innocuous an organization's name, the more the public should be on guard. Firms like State Affairs prosper by deliberately misleading the public. As we're deluged with information and statistics, a good question to ask is, ``Who paid for that information and why?'' by CNB