Obama Now Warming to Lobbyists

A huge mid-term election defeat has a way of injecting humility into a governing party. So it’s no surprise that the Obama administration is now starting to make nice with big-time lobbyists, as The Hill reports.

“For example, Donna Harman, president and CEO of the American Forest & Paper Association, was surprised to receive a phone call from Bob Perciasepe, deputy administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), last week,” the news service states.

“She said the EPA official thanked her for the way her trade group handled itself during a contentious rulemaking process that would have imposed tough new pollution controls on industrial boilers — a huge concern for her member companies in the paper and wood manufacturing business. Last week, EPA decided to ask for more than a year’s worth of time to re-propose the regulation. ‘The outreach is usually going one way, and that’s from me,’ Harman says. ‘Most of the time it is me calling them, not the other way around.’”