Gore Aide Once Wooed Pharmaceutical Group
By Dan Balz and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff
Writers Friday , July 7, 2000 ; A06
When Vice President Gore attacked Citizens for Better Medicare
this week for "polluting the airwaves" with ads opposing the
Democrats' prescription drug plan, he left out one important
fact: His own top message adviser once sought to run the
pharmaceutical industry's ad campaign.
Carter Eskew unsuccessfully made a pitch to the pharmaceutical
industry in mid-1999 to handle the lucrative advertising and
public relations account now being run through Citizens for
Better Medicare, an industry-funded group. A short time later,
Eskew left the public relations firm BSMG Worldwide to join
Gore's campaign as chief media adviser and message shaper.
In their memo to the industry, Eskew and his firm warned that "a
leading presidential aspirant" could turn prescription drugs into
a central issue in the 2000 elections and give industry opponents
an "enormous" forum. He proposed a public relations campaign "to
chill support for legislative efforts to impose . . . price
controls on prescription drug medicines by showing how those
measures would stifle the innovation at the core of the positive
image the industry has built since 1993."
Today, Eskew is the chief architect of Gore's new populist
message attacking the drug industry, big oil and other corporate
interests. This week Gore has relentlessly accused the
pharmaceutical industry of "price gouging," called Citizens for
Better Medicare "a phony coalition" and cast the difference
between himself and Texas Gov. George W. Bush as one of "Whose
side are you on?"
Asked yesterday about the apparent conflict between Eskew's past
work and the vice president's current message, Gore spokesman
Chris Lehane said, "Where's the hypocrisy? The guy wasn't
working for us at the time, and we never changed our views."
This is not the first instance in which Eskew's past work has
come into conflict with Gore's current positions. Before joining
the campaign, Eskew ran the tobacco industry's 1998 advertising
effort that successfully blocked anti-tobacco legislation that
Gore and President Clinton strongly favored.
The memo from Eskew's former firm to the pharmaceutical industry
was made available by a source who has worked for the industry
and who is providing assistance to the Bush presidential
campaign.
Gore campaign officials said Eskew's past work for the industry
is well known and has had no effect on the vice president. "The
vice president has a 20-year record of taking strong stands
against big pharmaceutical companies, and that record hasn't been
influenced by anyone who advises him now or has advised him in
the past," campaign communications director Mark Fabiani said.
Gore campaign officials criticized the Bush campaign for using
the firm headed by GOP media consultant Alex Castellanos to place
its television commercials at a time when Castellanos is making
the ads for the Citizens for Better Medicare campaign.
"The issue for us is not what present campaign advisers have done
in their past lives," Fabiani said. "It's what present campaign
advisers for Governor Bush are doing in their present lives,
which is managing Governor Bush's ad campaign at the very same
moment they're managing a multimillion program run by Citizens
for Better Medicare."
Bush campaign spokesman Ari Fleischer said there is no
coordination between the Bush team and Citizens for Better
Medicare, labeling the Gore campaign's charges "nonsense."
Gore continued to sound his populist rhetoric yesterday in
Chicago while offering a detailed critique of Bush's Medicare
policies as a threat to the health care of the nation's elderly.
Gore's answer to his Republican rival's plan, which the vice
president delivered at a senior center in the Chicago suburb of
Niles, was equal parts Ross Perot and Cesar Chavez, a mixture of
charts and passion for the poor. Gore criticized Bush for not
proposing a prescription drug benefit under Medicare and for
providing "not one dime" to extend the actuarial life of the
program.
"I'm on your side," Gore told the gray-haired crowd of about 200.
"I want to fight for the people. The other side fights for the
powerful."
Gore introduced no new policies in Chicago. He merely revisited
his earlier Medicare proposals: spending $253 billion over 10
years on a Medicare prescription drug benefit, restoring the $40
billion that had been cut from the funding for nursing homes and
rural hospitals, creating a Medicare surplus "lock box" and
devoting $75 billion to extend the Medicare trust fund for 30
years. Those programs, after subtracting $29 billion in savings
from the reduction of waste and fraud, would cost $339 billion
over 10 years.
The Bush campaign struck back at Gore for his populist tone,
calling him a "class-warfare warrior" who is returning to
"old-style attack politics." Spokesman Dan Bartlett said Bush
will provide low-income seniors with help paying for prescription
drugs and noted that Bush has endorsed bipartisan plans for
Medicare reform.
The vice president said Bush would have no money to devote to
Medicare after a $1.6 trillion tax cut, nearly $500 billion in
other spending increases and the setting aside of $1 trillion for
private Social Security accounts. "If you add up what he has
already proposed," Gore said, "it completely swamps the amount of
the surplus that's there."
Later, Gore spoke to the National Education Association (NEA),
one of two teachers unions that have endorsed him. He was
cheered as he outlined proposals that closely match the
priorities of the nation's largest teachers union – higher
salaries, smaller classes, modernized school buildings, gun
control to stem school violence and opposition to publicly-funded
vouchers for private school tuition.
But speaking the day after the NEA convention rejected
politically popular plans to tie teacher salaries to the academic
performance of students, the vice president did not back off his
earlier endorsement of such performance-based pay systems –
as long as teachers help design them.
Staff writer Kenneth J. Cooper contributed to this report.
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