Captive Audience by Susan P. Crawford

Author:Susan P. Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300153132
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Comcast lobbying story centers on David Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president of policy and the man who oversees its government relations office. Cohen is a likeable man with an unpretentious way of speaking. He has played an important role in the Democratic Party for a long time, and he is an irresistible force on behalf of Comcast. “If I had to negotiate with him, I'd be really worried,” one Hill staffer told me. “I believe David Cohen is the driving genius behind Comcast”—and Comcast must agree, since it pays him more than $10 million a year.10 He's a dynamo, a multitasker with as many as twenty people waiting to see him at any given time, a sender of e-mails at 5 A.M., a man of enormous energy, efficiency, and organization. He has thousands of names on his BlackBerry. Rhonda Cohen once told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she sees so little of her husband that “we've been married for 30 years, but in terms of time, we're still on our honeymoon.” The Cohens, who have two sons, met at Swarthmore, where she was editor of the school newspaper and he “slept half the day.”11 Things have changed.

According to Philadelphia Magazine, “he's so genial, and tends to speak to everyone in such pleasant baths of words—he's so naturally embracing—that it's easy to miss how purely competitive he is.” Indeed, Cohen is something of a street fighter; if a Hill staffer brings up issues that challenge his version of events he will bristle, turning from a diplomatic pussycat into a tiger. But above all he has discipline and control.12

In a sense, Cohen has been smoothing the way for the Comcast merger for his entire career. He is originally from New York, but he made his name in Pennsylvania Democratic politics. He has been described for years as the gateway to Pennsylvania politics and in 2010 was named by Politics Magazine as one of the “Top 10 Democrats” in the state. He was Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell's enormously effective chief of staff from 1992 to 1997.13 Buzz Bissinger's A Prayer for the City (1998), based on four years of wide-open access to Cohen and Rendell, chronicled in adulatory terms Cohen's unflappable, almost unearthly ability to stay focused despite little sleep for months on end. Bissinger wrote that Cohen, “like Radar on M*A*S*H, had the ability to be in the right place well before anyone even knew there was a right place.”14 The Pennsylvania Report, naming Cohen to its list of the seventy-five most influential figures in Pennsylvania politics in 2003, noted that “no one—in or out of government—is closer to Ed Rendell than Cohen. No major policy decision, personnel, political or other decision will be made without his imprimatur or veto.”15 When then-Governor Rendell held an impromptu press conference in May 2010 on the occasion of Arlen Specter's loss of his Senate seat, David Cohen—“Rendell's Karl Rove,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer—was at his side.16

Cohen and Rendell turned Philadelphia around by focusing on

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