"The revolving door connecting politics and interest-group advocacy is a Washington institution. For aspiring Democrats and Republicans alike, serving as a senior aide to a prominent politician is one of the main career paths for a lucrative career in lobbying -- and vice versa.

What McCain and Obama set out to do seems simple enough: ban lobbyists from their campaign staffs, thereby appealing to voters who have grown cynical in the wake of endless scandals involving politicians doing favors for lobbyists who plied them with campaign contributions.

Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) adopted such a standard when he launched his White House bid last year. Obama says that he now has no federal lobbyists on his campaign payroll and accepts no donations from lobbyists -- what would be a historic standard for a major-party presidential nominee.

Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), eager to compete as a reformer but stung by the disclosure of some of his aides' lobbying clients, announced his own policy this month: He too now bars lobbyists from staff positions. He will, however, continue to accept donations from them.

Unlike Obama, he also requires volunteer advisors to the campaign to disclose any lobbying ties and to agree not to lobby the candidate nor his Senate staff during the campaign.

While McCain and Obama exchanged barbs last week, it was McCain who was on the defensive after the resignation of five of his aides. They included a key fundraiser, Tom Loeffler, a former congressman who lobbied for corporate clients and the government of Saudi Arabia. Two other aides left after revelations that their lobbying firm had once represented the military government of Burma, now known as Myanmar.

In the Obama campaign, top strategist David Axelrod is an owner of a political consulting firm in Chicago and also is a partner in a company that specializes in what BusinessWeek magazine described as "astroturfing," also called grass-roots lobbying. It has organized campaigns to build public support to influence state and local government decisions, sometimes working with corporate-backed "citizen organizations" that espouse the company's point of view."



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