The Influence Game: Large Biz Has A Friend In Locke
His donors included Microsoft and Boeing, two home-state companies that Locke tried hard to please and whose issues he will almost certainly encounter as a Cabinet secretary.
Fortune 500 companies and other businesses gave at least $800,000 to the Democrats campaigns for governor, including at least $500,000 for his easy 2000 re-election, according to an Associated Press review of his campaign finance reports. The rest was split between his 1996 race and his 2004 campaign. He ultimately abandoned his third bid and refunded those donations.
Washington is among several states that let businesses donate to campaigns for governor. In Lockes 2000 race, they could give him $1,250 each for the primary and another $1,250 for the general election.
While the state is known for its high-tech industry, a variety of businesses, including many that lobby in the nations capital, gave to Locke: Northwest Airlines; Coca-Cola; grocer Safeway; brewer Anheuser-Busch; Washington Mutual Bank, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank; drugmakers Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck & Co., and Schering-Plough; the AT&T and Verizon telecommunications companies; and Texaco and Tesoro Petroleum. Enron, a Texas-based energy company that later collapsed in a fraud scandal, gave $2,000 in November 2001, the month before it filed for bankruptcy.
Also giving were Boeing and Microsoft and their executives and lobbying firms that represented them. Microsoft and donors connected to it gave at least $90,000, almost all for Lockes 2000 race, and Boeing and people linked to it donated at least $30,000, with most of that also for Lockes re-election campaign.
Microsoft Corp. and Boeing Co. stand out among Lockes corporate donors for the frequency with which their interests and activities made his agenda. Both are major Washington state employers with global business and spend millions lobbying in Washington, D.C. Boeings lobbying is likely to take on new urgency in light of the Pentagons plan to cut back on defense contracts.
In his new role, Locke is almost certain to deal with issues important to the pair, including intellectual property protection, cybersecurity, technical specifications and export controls and other trade matters. Both have long had employees on Commerce Department advisory panels.
Locke represented Microsoft as a private attorney after leaving the governors office. He is a longtime Microsoft investor and reported holding up to $250,000 worth of its stock in a financial disclosure statement he filed after his Cabinet nomination.
Lockes Microsoft stock is a concern, said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.
“I think it is a problem when a Cabinet official is in a position to make decisions impacting a company and they hold a significant amount of stock in that company because then theyre making decisions that impact their own financial interests,” Sloan said. “I think it is reasonable that Mr. Locke should have to do something with that stock, whether or not he divests it or he puts all of his holdings in some kind of blind trust and lets someone else make the decisions. Or he has the option of recusing himself from any decision affecting Microsoft.”
It was natural that Locke would help Microsoft and Boeing, given their importance to his state, but he now has a new role weighing the interests of businesses nationwide and must be careful not to favor home-state companies, Sloan said.
“I think Mr. Locke will have to be careful in regard to making decisions about any business that contributed heavily to his campaigns because I think there will always be perception issues of whether theres a conflict of interest,” Sloan said.
“Secretary Gary Locke joined the Obama administration because the president believes he can do for America what he did for Washington state, which is to create jobs and strengthen local economies by opening up foreign markets to American products and encouraging innovation,” Griffis said.
“It should be noted that in accepting the job, not only did Secretary Locke sign onto the administrations ethics pledge, the strictest in history, he also left a position at a top law firm in Washington state,” Griffis added. “Thats an obvious sacrifice and he made it to serve the public and improve the lives of Americans.”
When Locke was governor, Microsofts and Boeings futures in Washington state were in jeopardy.
Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, cutting jobs and prompting Locke to take steps to try to make the aerospace company happy lest it scale back further or leave Washington entirely. When Boeing was weighing where to build a new jetliner, it presented a list of desired incentives that Locke did his best to provide. Boeing picked the state.
Redmond-based Microsoft was fighting a Clinton administration antitrust case that threatened to break up the software giant. Locke publicly opposed the Justice Department case and called a federal judges early decision to split up Microsoft “draconian, unnecessary and unjustified.”