Washington Post takes on lobbyists

This morning's Washington Post puts forth a 38-hundred word story examining former Clinton Defense Secretary Willam Cohen's career transition from government to lobbying.

After more than 30 years in politics, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was saddled with credit card debt.

The baker's son from Bangor, Maine, was never wealthy, and his government salary went only so far. When the motorcades and military escorts ended in January 2001, his final financial disclosure form listed tens of thousands of dollars of charge-account debts at interest rates as high as about 25 percent.

Within weeks of leaving office, he was living in a $3.5 million McLean mansion with a swimming pool, a cabana and a carriage house.

Cohen's career had entered a classic final phase: the monetizing of the public man.

Instead of returning to Maine, which he had represented in the House and Senate for more than two decades, Cohen followed legions of government officials into the business of consulting and lobbying. Trading on an insider's knowledge, contacts and personal cachet, the former defense secretary created his own Washington firm, the Cohen Group , which works for some of the biggest companies in the defense industry.

During his legislative career, Cohen stood for "purity of the political process," according to the Almanac of American Politics. He made his name as a young Republican voting to impeach President Richard Nixon over Watergate, and, he said in an interview, passed up lucrative options to stay in public life. He sponsored lobbying reforms.

Now, his firm promotes itself by touting its connections.

The story does not, as you might expect from the highlighted quote, have anything to say about other high-profile government officials who make the lobbyist leap. There is nothing about, for example, former Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-LA), who ushered through the obscene Medicare prescription drug plan, and then went immediately to work for PhRMA, drug industry trade association, earning an estimated $2 million a year.

But, maybe I'm being cynical. Perhaps this is just the first installment of an open-ended series looking at the "monetizing" of public men and women.

Of course, if this is the case, I can't figure out why they chose to begin with a man who left public life ten years ago, and whose name most people would be hard-pressed to come up with in a pop quiz.

But, again, maybe I'm just being cynical. Surely, this story isn't of a philosophical piece with the Times' recent two-thousand-word expose of the Clintons' marriage. This can't be a case of the news media ignoring all of today's GOP-driven scandals in favor of yet another round of retro Clinton-bashing.