Hardball Beltway Consultants Could Radically Alter WGA Strike

WITH CALIFORNIA HURTLING TOWARD a February 5 presidential primary and a bitter writers’ strike starting to cripple TV programming, the decision by Bill Clinton’s former “masters of disaster,” Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, to join the studio side has infuriated labor leaders, sparked accusations of betrayal — and boosted the likelihood of Washington-style political hijinks.

What’s unclear is whether Fabiani and Lehane can translate the slash-and-burn partisan style they learned inside the Beltway to a company-town battle in Hollywood in which their clients are not horribly flawed Democratic leaders, but wealthy divisions of vast transnational corporations.

Famed as the “masters of disaster” for their spin control during the Clinton scandals of the late 1990s, the pair parlayed their success into high-profile work for Democrats nationwide, including Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

It’s made both men quite rich, and now they’re reeling in $100,000 a month to help the mega-media companies beat back the Writers Guild of America. Some bigtime Democrats are outraged. Andy Stern, powerful chief of the huge Service Employees International Union, flatly tells L.A. Weekly he is out to “blacklist” them from getting paid to oversee labor-affiliated political campaigns and ballot measures in the future. And the nation’s most influential lefty blogger, Markos Moulitsas, of the California-based Daily Kos, calls Fabiani and Lehane liars.

Stern says he and his fellow “Change to Win” union leaders — major unions that broke off from the AFL-CIO a few years ago — are severing ties with Lehane and Fabiani, and he predicts that their days in the labor movement “are numbered.”

Lehane slams Stern publicly over the writers’ strike, conjuring up images of $200,000-per-year writers who hardly need help from organized labor, telling the media, “The real issue here is that Stern needs to do some explaining on how it is that he is fighting for people who make more than doctors and pilots against the interest of real working-class people (“below the line” artists and workers) and spend “less time punching at shadows.”

Lehane’s firm helped roll out filmmaker Michael Moore’s Sicko, a clarion call for national health care beloved by labor leaders, but Lehane has bitterly complained to the San Francisco Chronicle that he earned “zero, nada” from the cash-rich unions — and that everything he did was at cost or pro bono.

Moulitsas daintily refers to Lehane as “that ass Chris Lehane,” who is “working to bust the writers union.” Although Lehane insists he did past labor work “pro bono,” Moulitsas retorts that Lehane’s firm was actually getting over $14,000 per month.

The WGA leadership may or may not be following a politically adroit course in conducting this strike, which was triggered by the studios’ and their corporate owners’ refusal to give writers a cut of new revenues from the Internet downloads of movies and TV episodes and advertising during streaming video of their shows. That money is not big by Hollywood standards — yet — but writers don’t want to be left holding the bag as they were 20 years ago, when they agreed to take a pittance from an untried new technology called the videocassette, and lost millions.

But whatever happens in the writers’ battle for a slice of the pie, the entry of Fabiani and Lehane into the fray is fast becoming an awkward issue in the Democratic presidential campaigns.

All of the top Democratic presidential candidates publicly support the writers. Hillary Clinton, for whom they both worked during the late Clinton administration, has walked the picket line with the writers. Yet Lehane has been working for Clinton locally — recently fighting a plan by Republicans in Sacramento to change California’s presidential vote in the Electoral College.

With Fabiani and Lehane being paid $100,000 a month by the studios, if history is any guide, things are going to get much more negative in Los Angeles — and the strike will increasingly be linked to the approaching presidential primary.

Already, some top labor leaders are reluctant to slam Lehane and Fabiani for joining the studios.

California Labor Federation chief Art Pulaski, for whom Lehane worked recently opposing Schwarzenegger’s proposal to tax businesses and dramatically expand government-supported health care in California, says he’s “not sure” about future campaigns with the duo.

And state Labor Federation communications director Anastasia Ordonez says, “It is a very unclear situation,” noting that, while Labor Federation members are picketing with the striking Hollywood writers, the Writers Guild is not exactly a member of the traditional labor circle, since it’s not affiliated with the California Labor Federation.

Their caution is driven by the fact that presidential politics is about to hit California in a very big way. If Hillary Clinton does end up winning the Democratic presidential nomination — and California will play a key role in that outcome — and if the Clintons maintain their close ties to Lehane and Fabiani, many powerful labor types won’t want to cross the Clintons’ slick-talking PR allies.

Lehane and Fabiani aren’t the only hired guns for the studios. But the other key PR hire by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers at least makes some political sense — their use of Los Angeles spin doctor Steve Schmidt, a Republican who ran George W. Bush’s war room in 2004 and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign in 2006, and still is a senior adviser to John McCain.