Tom Donohue: Obama's Tormentor By Devin Leonard

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Business Week

Cover Story November 3, 2010, 11:00PM EST

Tom Donohue: Obama's Tormentor
If the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has his way, the President's change agenda is finished

By Devin Leonard

“.....Two days before Halloween, a squadron of protesters from the radical feminist group CodePink showed up in front of the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. The agitators, who were dressed as vampires, produced masks bearing the craggy visage of Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber's white-haired chief executive. Through the wonders of Photoshop, they had given him a wicked set of eyebrows, sharp fangs, and a red-stained mouth.....The protesters unfurled a black "Chamber of Horrors" banner and chanted, castigating the chamber for spending upwards of $50 million to help flip the leadership of the House of Representatives from Democratic to Republican. "Help! Help! Dracula Donohue is sucking the blood from me and you!" they wailed. "Help! Help! The Chamber of Commerce is making this election even worse. Help! Help! We're under attack. We want our democracy back!"...The 72-year-old Donohue could hear it all from his fourth-floor office, where he was trying not to gloat on the eve of a midterm election that was about to come out almost exactly as he hoped. "It sounds like our friends are here," he said.....The head of the Chamber of Commerce—the nation's largest business trade association, with an annual budget of $258 million—doesn't mind being called a bloodsucker or inspiring howls of protest. To the contrary, the opposition lets his members know he's doing his job—which makes them more likely to give money to his organization......During the last two years, empowered by $350 million in donations from corporations such as Dow Chemical (DOW), Goldman Sachs (GS), Chevron Texaco (CVX), and many other anonymous sources, Donohue has emerged as President Obama's most effective antagonist. Almost every time the President introduced a major initiative, the chamber and its leader were primed to attack: New health-care laws imposed a "burdensome mandate on employers," and the Administration's Wall Street reforms would "choke off" business' access to capital. And don't get Donohue started on the White House's climate change proposals. It didn't matter that Obama helped resuscitate the banking system, bailed out auto manufacturers, and meddled far less with Wall Street than many of his supporters would have wished. Donohue tapped into a powerful vein of discontent within the business community and rode it like a rocket......Perhaps not surprisingly, his enemies were enormously gratified when the chamber stumbled early in its anti-Obama campaign. In August 2009, William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice-president for environment, technology, and regulatory affairs, called for public hearings on the validity of the climate science that had triggered the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. He predicted a spectacular debate much like that surrounding the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which proponents of evolution and creationism battled in court, a remark that suggested the chamber was as skeptical about the dangerous effects of global warming as some of its Republican allies. The response was swift: Five major companies, including Apple (AAPL) and Nike (NKE), resigned from the board or from chamber membership in the face of the public outcry, and some local chambers distanced themselves from Kovacs' comments. "I think the chamber's approach is somewhat old school," Valerie Jarrett, one of the President's senior advisers, complained to the Huffington Post. ....As the criticism reached a boil, Donohue reminded everybody of why he's a Washington institution who has been around since 1997. He repudiated his senior vice-president's inflammatory statement and moderated the chamber's tone on global warming just enough to calm some of its critics ("So let me state without equivocation: We, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, support strong action on climate change"). Donohue also ramped up his organization's fundraising. Its opaque 501(c) operation, which is not legally required to identify its funding sources, poured $32 million into television "issue" advertising often critiquing Obama's allies in Congress during this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The vast majority goes to Republican candidates. (Obama and his allies shot back, accusing the chamber of accepting undisclosed funds from foreign corporations, a charge Donohue vehemently denies.) The chamber's partner in the campaign was Karl Rove's American Crossroads, a conservative fundraising group whose president, Steven Law, is a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce general counsel. "The chamber and the Crossroads groups meet periodically and share information about where they will be engaged in the U.S. Senate and House races in order to make sure that efforts aren't doubled," said Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Rove's organization, on the eve of the election......

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