“Manchinema become K Street darlings” is the laughable headline on the Washington Post’s newsletter this week. The implication is that Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema was not already a K Street darling but became one by opposing the Democrats’ big tax-and-spend bill.
The Post says that much of this money is coming from “sectors that see Manchin and Sinema as two of their best hopes for keeping programs they loathe out of President Biden’s social spending bill,” including drugmakers and oil and gas companies.
All of this scrutiny is valuable, but the Post’s headline points to the problem here. The same outlets covering Sinema’s coziness with lobbyists and all of her industry money were silent about this coziness in 2018 when she was the Democratic nominee for Senate in Arizona.
Sinema was the top recipient of lobbyist money among nonincumbents in 2018. She was second among nonincumbents to only Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke when it came to money from the financial sector. She was the No. 4 nonincumbent on hauling in Pharma money that cycle. And from all of these industries, she outraised her Republican opponent, Martha McSally.
In other words, K Street lobbyists and Big Business spent big to get Sinema into the Senate in 2018, favoring her over her Republican opponent. Funny how this didn’t gather much attention from major media at the time.
I looked through the 2018 coverage by the outlets now covering Sinema’s corporate and lobbyist donations. The New York Times’s coverage of the Sinema-McSally race mentioned GOP donors and let Sinema call herself independent while never mentioning her Wall Street and K Street coziness.
The Washington Post mentioned she was “good at raising money” but never specified that she is good at raising money from corporate lobbyists who like the subsidies and tax carveouts she gives their employers.
Similarly, I can’t find Politico mentioning that Sinema was outraising and outspending McSally in 2018 because Wall Street and K Street were backing Sinema.
Now that Sinema is opposing President Joe Biden’s tax-and-spend bill — which is packed with tons of corporate goodies that lobbyists support, by the way — all of these outlets are out with stories absurdly implying her resistance is the result of her being bought off by big business lobbies. Politico, the Times, and the Post.
The current scrutiny on Sinema’s donors is fitting. The past blindness to her donors is telling.
