Fred and the Abortion Lobbying Kerfuffle

The Campaign Spot over at National Review Online notes that the NY Times has received the billing records from the lobbying firm in question. In two posts, here and here, Geraghty takes a good hard look at them.

You can read his conclusions for yourself, but here's my take on it.

Lobbyists are paid to advance a policy to those in power. They do not necessarily agree with all the policies they promote. (come on, folks, can you say you agree with every policy your job makes you adhere to and--if you have contact with people outside the company--promote?) Therefore, this whole thing is much ado about nothing.

Also worth noting is that Fred spent 19 hours total over 14 months. The longest time period billed was around 2.5 hours. Let's see... 14 months, 40 hours a week, if we assume 4 weeks a month that's 2,240 hours. Of which 19 (nineteen) was for this particular client. If I am figuring this right, that means that 0.8% of his time over those 14 months was on this client. They weren't really that important a client to him, I daresay.

Thompson's pseudo-campaign does, however, need to get some communication straightened out. It seems that Fred and his spokesman Mark Corallo were on two different pages, and that's not good. Fortunately, there is time to recover yet.