Whitman Lobbying for BP
Today’s Washington Post story “BP is getting more political, and that may help weather oil-spill storm”, reports that Christie Whitman has joined a notorious group of beltway scumbags lobbying for Gulf oil polluter BP:
BP America, the company’s U.S. affiliate, has a special “external advisory council” that includes former House majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.); two former GOP senators, Warren Rudman (N.H.) and Alan K. Simpson (Wyo.); Christine Todd Whitman, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George W. Bush; and Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general during Bill Clinton‘s administration, according to BP records. Leon Panetta, President Obama’s CIA director, also served on the council before taking his intelligence post.
And we thought it was disgusting when Whitman became a shill for the nuclear industry:
Nuclear spin
Still, Christie Whitman is a PR asset for the nuclear industry. She’s a major political figure widely seen as a moderate. She was the first (and only, to date) woman governor of New Jersey, who ascended to the national stage by responding to President Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union address and co-chairing the 1996 Republican National Convention with then-Governor George W. Bush.
Moreover, Whitman has worked hard to obscure her spotty environmental record. Even as she was dismantling New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, “She would ride her bicycle, she would horseback ride, and she would do a lot of public events around open space preservation,” Bill Wolfe told PR Watch. “So, the public perception of her was very favorable on the environment.”