This 'Swamp' Has No Drain!
Al Mottur admits to not only counting his chickens before they hatched but putting out all the fixings for a fried chicken feast. The veteran Democratic lobbyist went into Election Day assuming Hillary Clinton would be America’s 45th president, and as a member of Clinton’s national finance committee who helped raise more than $1 million for her campaign, that would have been a victory not just for his party but also for his bottom line. “I was thinking, This is going to be great for my firm,” recalls Mottur, a senior partner at D.C. lobbying powerhouse Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Schreck, which represents such companies as Anheuser-Busch, FedEx and Comcast.
As it did for so many others, the election results stunned Mottur; Donald Trump’s victory left him deeply disappointed, personally. Professionally, however, he quickly surmised that his company would be just fine. Several well-connected Republican lobbyists on the team were involved with the Trump campaign, his White House transition team or both, Mottur notes, “so we’ve just been switching our marketing emphasis.”
That’s the same abrupt adjustment dozens of lobbying companies, trade associations and corporations have been making in the months since American voters tapped a bombastic real estate tycoon with zero political experience to be the nation’s next president. Stupefaction and confusion are giving way to hard-nosed capitalism as K Street realizes all the business opportunities to be had. As part of his populist appeal, Trump promised to drain the fetid “swamp” along the Potomac, an incestuous bog
