Unlike President Barack Obama, Republican Mitt Romney won't reveal his complete list of big fund-raisers known as bundlers but we're finally getting a glimpse into how many of his big money players work as Washington lobbyists.
The Republican nominee filed a required report this week with the Federal Election Commission divulging at least 63 Washington registered lobbyists have helped raise money for him since the election began, with 42 of them active in the last three months. Those 42 helped raise $9 million since July alone. Obama has yet to report his list of lobbyists.
Among the bigger names to appear for the first time on Romney's lobbyist fund-raiser list was Bill Paxon, the former Republican New York congressman who was a key lieutenant to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s Republican rise in Congress.
Paxon is no stranger to raising big sums of money: he once ran the House Republicans' fund-raising arm known as the National Republican Congressional Committee. He helped raise $368,000 for Romney since July, the new fund-raising report shows.
Paxon's list of lobbying clients have a lot at stake with the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Among the corporate giants he represents is Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness conglomerate with a huge interest in ethanol and biofuels policy; the defense contractors Fluor Corp. and Boeing, whose business could be impacted by impending massive Pentagon budget cuts, and drug industry giants like Pfizer, the Pharmaceuticals Manufacturers & Research Association (known as PhRMA) and Dow Chemical, whose business could be impacted by everything from Medicare reform to tax code changes. Lobbyist John Castellani, another lobbyist for PhMRA, also joined Romney's fund-raising team since the summer.
Another New Yorker to show up on the lobbyist list was former Sen. Al D'Amato, whose big clients include defense giants United Technologies and Lockheed Martin, the utility NRG Energy and the gambling lobby known as the Poker Players Alliance.
Only three lobbyists on the Romney team have raised at least $1 million each for the GOP nominee: Bill Graves of the American Trucking Associations, David Beightol of Dutko Worldwide and Dirk Van Dongen of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, the report to the Federal Election Commission showed,
Two newcomers to the Romney fund-raising team are energy lobbyists: Brian Miller who represents BP, and James Hooley, who represents the natural gas firm Clean Energy Fuels, the report shows.
While we don't know the non-lobbyist members of Romney's fun-raising bundling team, our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics have managed to identify at least 37 of them using public source documents and news clips. Their analysis shows those bundlers predominantly come from the financial, real estate and energy sectors.
Click here to see the full list that the Center came up with.
Obama has released his full list of bundlers, which now total 638 high-dollar fund-raisers who have helped raise more than $140 million for his re-election campaign. Obama's bundlers run the gamut from Hollywood's Jeffrey Katzenberg to investment banker Jay Snyder.
The president, however, has yet to file his latest report on which bundlers are registered lobyyists. That is expected to arrive at the FEC as soon as this weekend.
