While Barack Obama has publicly scorned Senators Clinton and McCain for taking lobbyist money and keeping them in their employ, Newsweek reports that the Senator’s own lobbyist ties may hit very close to home. David Axelrod, according to the report, was the mastermind of a public relations campaign used to lobby Illinois lawmakers. CORE or the Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, was created by ASK Public Strategies which ran television ads that never revealed they were created for their client Illinois utility company Commonwealth Edison. The brainchild of the campaign was David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager.

CORE has publicly acknowledged receiving money from ComEd for its media campaign but did not include in the ads late last year any reference that the big utility was a financial sponsor.

Quinn said such an omission was a deliberate attempt by CORE and ComEd to deceive the public. (Electric Utility Week Feb 19th, 2007)

Eventually CORE voluntarily began running disclaimers on the ads funded by the utility, though it claimed no Illinois law or court decision demanded it do so.

While Obama has regularly demonized lobbyists, he has often used the term as a catch-all while ignoring that many corporations, public relations companies, unions and organizations (think PETA, ACLU) employ lobbyists or themselves lobby local, state and federal governments.

Axelrod sees a contrast between his lobbying and that conducted by those on McCain’s staff, including the fact that he doesn’t work in D.C. and he says he never sat down with lawmakers and personally lobbied them on behalf of a corporate client. He told Huffington Post:

“What I do is make ads and try to involve people in the process, people outside the halls of legislatures or city councils, to get involved in public issues. What lobbyists do is go behind closed doors and try to influence lawmakers sometimes with implied promises of support for their campaign and so on, It is fundamentally different. I have never lobbied a politician on behalf of a client in my life. And I certainly have never talked to Obama about any client. It is a red herring put up by a campaign that is being run by the most powerful corporate lobbyist in Washington in Charlie Black and being managed by a corporate lobbyist.”

So does the intent to influence lawmakers decisions for pay by corporations make you a lobbyist?