W.H. officials urged participants to help promote the president’s jobs agenda. | AP Photos Anti-lobbyist W.H. asks for their help

President Barack Obama has long loved lambasting lobbyists — but he’s not above asking for their help.

Key White House officials solicited at least 10 notable lobbyists for their support of the Obama administration’s jobs initiatives during a two-hour briefing Thursday that included a total of between 70 and 80 people, four individuals present at the gathering confirmed to POLITICO.


White House officials urged participants to help in the effort to promote the president’s jobs agenda, but they didn’t lay out specific requests, according to sources at the meeting. They did, however, complain about GOP efforts to hold up Obama’s jobs legislation.

“They talked about the frustrations for them with the Republicans in Congress and them trying to stop the process from happening, or the Jobs Act from happening,” said Jamie Baxter, advocacy manager at the Association for Career and Technical Education, who attended the briefing.

Said another lobbyist who attended the meeting: “The White House wanted to enlist [our] help to get their message out. It was the White House looking for help. The help of progressive lobbyists.”

But some participants had a request of their own: stop demonizing lobbyists.

“There was actually one gentleman in the audience that asked them to not use such strong language around lobbyists and share that lobbyists are actually advocates,” Baxter said. Baxter added, however, that “there was no real commitment to change” from the White House regarding its staunch anti-lobbyist posture.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz described the gathering as a routine affair.

“The White House holds outreach briefings very regularly with various leaders throughout the country to talk about the American Jobs Act and the President’s desire for Congress to pass this important legislation now so we can get people back to work,” Schultz said in a statement.

Indeed, meetings between executive branch officials and K Streeters are, in and of themselves, not extraordinary. The Obama administration often has met with lobbyists — those who are formally registered and others who seek to influence policy through more informal means.

But this meeting comes at a time when Obama is battling Republicans for political supremacy on jobs issues — among the most critical issues of the 2012 presidential election. And such briefings are rarely as formal as the Thursday meeting, conducted in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.

“I’ve never attended a kind of a formalized one like this,” Baxter said. “They’ve had meetings that they called specifically on the Jobs Act that they’ve had in the Truman office a couple times, but that’s usually just [Director of the Office of Public Engagement] Jon Carson and someone else from domestic policy, not this slew of speakers that they had yesterday.”

The meeting also featured a notably large group of influence brokers who have long watched and listened as Obama and his aides continue to target K Street, both in word and deed, as the bane of Washington.

Obama has skewered them in speeches. He’s refused to take their campaign money. He’s banned them from serving on executive advisory committees and strictly limited the ability of former lobbyists to serve in his administration.

“You need leadership you can trust to work for you, not for the special interests who have had their thumb on the scale. And together, we will tell Washington, and their lobbyists, that their days of setting the agenda are over,” Obama said, for example, in 2008 during a Wisconsin campaign rally, as quoted by the St. Petersburg Times. “They have not funded my campaign. You have. They will not run my White House. You’ll help me run my White House.”

Obama still has plenty of backers on K Street, particularly among Democrats, government reform organizations and liberal special interest groups. but many have bristled at the White House rhetoric.

“It’s important that people know that lobbyists represent real constituent groups and that we are a voice for specific interests and that we do have our members, their opinions at heart and what’s concerning them,” Baxter said. “So it’s important for us to share that and for us not to get a bad name when we’re trying to advocate on issues that affect a certain portion of the American people.”

Joel Packer, a principal at Raben Group who attended the Thursday meeting, said he thinks it’s “sort of silly” that the White House has banned the hiring of lobbyists.

“I guess I would say that because I think it’s hard to paint a whole set of people of a particular profession with a certain brush, but I sort of get it,” he said.

The Republican National Committee, for its part, criticized Obama after the meeting.

“The president who promised to end special interest access to the White House is now inviting lobbyists in ‘to enlist their help,’” Republican National Committee Research Director Joe Pounder said in an email after reading an initial POLITICO report of the gathering. “Yet another broken promise to the American people from 2008.”

Lobbyists and influence professionals confirmed at the meeting include Baxter, Packer, Rick Hind of Greenpeace, Cristina Antelo of the Podesta Group, Aaron Houston of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and Jim Green of Mercury Strategies.

Speaking on behalf of the White House were Carson, Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs David Agnew, Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger, Counselor for Strategic Engagement to the Senior Adviser Mike Strautmanis and Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations Raul Alvillar.

Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett also appeared briefly at the end of the meeting.

Correction: Albert Morales of IBM Business Consulting did not attend the meeting, as stated in a previous version of this post.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Bridget Mulcahy @ 11/12/2011 10:07 AM Correction: Albert Morales of IBM Business Consulting did not attend the meeting, as stated in a previous version of this post.