March 15, 2005
LIEBERMAN JOINS H&K

Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Connecticut Senator, Joe, has joined Hill & Knowlton as senior counselor in its Washington, D.C., office. She will serve in the WPP Group unit’s health & pharmaceutical group.

Lieberman

Lieberman has held posts at Saint Raphael Hospital (New Haven), American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center (Jerusalem), APCO Assocs., Pfizer and Hoffmann-La Roche.

She reports to Anna McCollister-Slipp, who recently joined from Manning, Selvage & Lee. Slipp was PA director at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Cato Institute.

H&K also announced that Jeffrey Levine, an 18-year veteran of CNN, has signed on as senior VP-healthcare media relations.

Most recently, Levine was health communications director at the American Institutes for Research, where he handled the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases accounts. He also worked at Ketchum.

First, rather interesting use of last name in announcement, as if they were touting LIEBERMAN and not Hadassah herself.

Second, McCollister-Slipp’s connections to Cato as well as Radio Free Europe run up a flag. Remember that at least one Cato columnist resigned last year because they had been paid by Abramoff to write favorable essays…and then these bits at ZoomInfo on McCollister-Slipp. This part raised the hackles on my neck:

Prior to joining MS&L, she was director of public affairs for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded news organization that broadcasts to the former Soviet Bloc. While there, she helped create supporters among high-profile journalists and congressmen who were previously hostile to the organization, neutralizing a public campaign to end congressional funding for RFE/RL. In addition, she was instrumental in developing the idea of and garnering support for the establishment of Radio Free Iran and Radio Free Iraq, which are now broadcasting objective news and information to the citizens of those countries.

McCollister-Slipp is the former director of public affairs at the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank. Following the 1994 congressional elections, she was critical in raising the think tank’s profile among national media, positioning Cato as the organization that provided the intellectual capital that fueled the movement toward smaller government. Through her efforts, Cato and its scholars were featured in such publications as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times, as well as ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, among many others.

So McCollister joins H&K not that long before Hadassah does; she’s exited Cato conveniently before the alarms went off about Bandow at Cato, as if she was…well, whatever. You’ll figure it out.

Who the hell is McCollister-Slipp? Would we find any interesting campaign contributions to PAC’s tied to that name?

From Al Reis and Jack Trout’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing:

Law One – “It’s better to be first than it is to be better.”

From Ayn Rand:

“In any contest where force is the arbiter, the murderer will always win out over the pickpocket.”

Military historian Nathan Bedford Forrest:

“Get there firstest with the mostest.”

Rove, driven by messianic zeal and unencumbered by morals, will do what he believes is necessary, and he’s learned that the media won’t call him on his behavior. It’s been an effective tool so far, but it might be reaching its limits, and I hope that Dems don’t try to play this game back.

Paul Hackett, Ned Lamont, Rocky Anderson, FDL, Crooks and Liars, Keith Olbermann, John Tester.

We’re not gonna take it, anymore.

-GSD

Yep. When even a Ken Salazar says, “enough” (wrt to Rummy and “appeasers”) the tide is finally turning. Even Rahm feels safe enough to put his toe in the water.

scarecrow, one thing I found interesting is that Schlessinger’s numbers are going down at the same time Joe’s are trending down.
Presumaby, Schlessinger is losing support to Joe, but it can’t keep up with the volume of support that Joe is losing to Ned.
My hope is that Schumur, Hillary, and Ned can show these graphs to the those deep pocketed Democratic donors keeping Joe in the race.

This suggests that JL’s tactic of wooing Repub votes is near its limits. The battleground is in the Dems and moderate Indies, for whom JL’s cozying with rightwing talkshow hosts and Cheney should be toxic. His statements re Rummy and the Shays Iraq withdrawal suggest his campaign now realizes their survival depends on holding on to the middle, but his flip-flops on precisely the issues on which he’s staked his reputation of being principled should take a toll. We’ll soon see.