WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama says he does not want to use special-interest money to pay for inaugural events, but the lobbyists are coming anyway. The calendar is chock full of parties, receptions, brunches, breakfasts, lunches, dinners and prayer services, many and perhaps most designed to bring those who need influence into contact with those who wield it.
A running and incomplete tally of official and unofficial inaugural events kept by a Washington lobbyist runs to 41 pages and at least 206 events crammed into the week that began Jan. 14.
Obama's ban on money directly from lobbyists, corporations, political action committees and labor unions affects only official inaugural events overseen by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, a small subset of all the back-slapping and rug-cutting occurring in the capital. And it allows individuals who may be associated with those causes to donate up to $50,000, or "bundle" as much as $300,000.
More than three-quarters of the $35 million donated by last week toward the target of $45 million was raised by bundlers, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan consumer group Public Citizen.
Among them are executives from at least half a dozen embattled Wall Street firms, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the bankrupt Lehman Brothers, the analysis showed.
Obama should be lauded for curbing special-interest money and being more open about disclosing who is giving, but "what they ought to do is push for public funding to make sure a small group of people doesn't get special access," said David Arkush, of Public Citizen.
"It's got to be hard to ignore people who give you $50,000."
Donors of at least $10,000 receive admission to one of three inauguration-eve dinners which the Obamas and Bidens are expected to attend.
The larger the donation, the closer the seating to the head table, according to one person arranging tickets for large donors.
Committee spokeswoman Linda Douglass said the donations are from personal bank accounts and not corporate coffers.
Restrictions Obama has placed on fundraising are "the greatest in recent inaugural history, and our transparency is unprecedented," Douglass said.
While limiting the amount of easily identifiable special-interest money may allow Obama to score public relations points, it may also have the perverse effect of making inaugural season lobbying and schmoozing more efficient, according to Kent Cooper, who runs Capitol Hill Access, a Web site that tracks Washington's political and lobbying networks.
