by Laura Miller

A handful of sibling companies with close ties to the Republican Party and roots in the tobacco industry are at the top of heavy-hitting corporate and political campaign strategists. Four limited liability corporations are at the nexus of millions of dollars of influence-buying money:

• The DCI Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying and PR shop that specializes in creating quasi-grassroots organizations and publishes "Tech Central Station," a website "where free markets meet technology";
• Feather Larson Synhorst-DCI, a telemarketing and political consulting firm with offices in Washington, St. Paul and Phoenix;
• FYI Messaging, a political direct mail company based in Phoenix; and
• TSE Enterprises, a Phoenix-based internet PR company that creates and host websites and does electronic direct mail.

The companies have overlapping clients and are most visibly linked to each other by Thomas Synhorst, a founding member of each. They took in $20 million for their work to help elect George W. Bush in 2004, and they count AT&T, Microsoft, and the giant trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) as clients.

The DCI Group calls itself a "strategic public affairs consulting firm" and boasts that it handles corporate issues like political campaigns. "We are a political firm and all of our partners have political campaign experience. We thrive in competitive circumstances, and are used to fluid situations and tight deadlines," their website claims. DCI Group offers services that include national, state and local lobbying; coalition building; and generating "grasstops" and constituent support for issues. The firm has been linked to several industry-funded coalitions that pose as grassroots organizations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise as DCI advertises its ability to provide "third party support" to clients. "Corporations seldom win alone," the group's website says. "Whatever the issue, whatever the target - elected officials, regulators or public opinion - you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best."

The use of third-party front groups is common in the business of swaying public opinion. Traditionally, however, strategic influencers view the news media as the channel through which their message flows from the front group to the target audience. DCI and its affiliates offer "direct contact" that bypasses the media entirely. The client's message is directly delivered via phone banks, regular mail and/or the internet. Direct contact provides the campaigners with complete control over the message. Freed from the filters created by news outlets, they can be as biased and inflammatory as the message shaper deems necessary.

"We play to win," proclaims FLSphones.com, the website of Feather Larson Synhorst-DCI. In addition to phone banks, the firm offers a "letter desk" service, explained as follows: "Personal letters from constituents are proving to be increasingly effective in swaying legislators' opinions on hot issues. FLS can economically generate hundreds or thousands of letters on your behalf - all unique, but conveying your desired message. Each letter is personalized, individually signed and often includes a handwritten postscript from the constituent."

FLS also offers "patch-through" calling, in which people reached via phone bank are immediately patched through to their legislators, thus generating a stream of constituent phone calls that echo the client's message: "FLS has worked to design scripting and call systems that generate high-quality patch-through calls," the website boasts. "Constituents are connected directly to their legislators, and in some cases are giving individual talking points to help convey your message to their elected official in a personal way." Other services offered include automated phone calling using pre-recorded messages; inbound phone services, meaning the company provides staff to answer incoming calls to toll-free numbers; and information collection services, including emails.

FLS-DCI co-founder Tony Feather, who served as a political director of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, is also responsible for the creation of Progress for America, a soft-money group that raised and spent $28.8 million to support Bush in 2004. FLS-DCI's website prominently features a quote from top Bush advisor Karl Rove, himself a direct mail expert. "I know these guys well," Rove states. "They become partners with the campaigns they work with. From designing the program to drafting scripts; from selecting targets to making the calls in a professional, successful way they work as hard to win your races as you do."

Smoking Out DCI's Past

What the DCI Group "does best" - creating "credible coalition partners" - is a skill that the group's managing partners - Tom Synhorst, Doug Goodyear, and Tim Hyde - developed during nearly a decade of work in the 1990s for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

DCI chair Thomas J. Synhorst got his start working in the 1980s as an aide for Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). In 1988 Synhorst ran Bob Dole's presidential primary campaign in Iowa, winning the state's early caucus over George H.W. Bush. He later worked on Dole's 1996 presidential bid, having by then set up the political consulting and telemarketing firm, Direct Connect, Inc. Simultaneously, Synhorst also worked as a Midwestern field representative for R.J. Reynolds. Some of details of his work in that capacity can be found through internet searches of RJR's internal documents that were publicly released as part of the states attorneys general lawsuit against the tobacco industry. As early as 1990, Synhorst's name turns up in in a letter from RJR field operations manager Mark Smith. The letter outlines the tobacco company's strategy for undermining a workplace smoking ban at a Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. Synhorst was one of the RJR field coordinators suggested to meet with a Boeing employee who opposed the anti-smoking policy.

The work of a field coordinator for RJR included keeping track of state and local smoking bans and cigarette tax initiatives; monitoring workplace smoking bans; meeting with company sales representatives; developing and supporting "smoker's rights" groups, including setting up meetings, circulating petitions, and providing materials; contacting school districts concerning RJR's youth program; placing people in public meetings and meetings with legislators to support the tobacco industry's position; getting letters to the editor printed in local and regional newspapers; and creating alliances with organizations with similar concerns, such as anti-tax groups.

In one internal memo, field representatives were instructed: "Xerox like crazy. When a favorable letter to the editor is printed, getting people to copy the letters and send them to their elected officials with a note saying (essentially) 'This is what I think, too,' is key. [Letters to the editor] now become a two-step process: Step One is getting them published. Step Two is circulating them as widely as possible."

The DCI Group's CEO, Douglas M. Goodyear, used to work on behalf of R.J. Reynolds. Before joining the DCI group, he was a vice president at Walt Klein and Associates, a PR firm whose work for RJR dates back to at least the1980s. In 1993, Goodyear was instrumental in the creation of Ramhurst Corporation, an organization that received money from R.J. Reynolds to ensure that tobacco industry efforts in Washington were supported by and coordinated with RJR's nation-wide fake grassroots operations. According to internal RJR documents, in 1994 Ramhurst received $2.6 million for "executing tactical programs on federal, state or local issues; developing a network of smokers' rights groups and other coalition partners within the region that will speak out on issues important to the Company; implementing training and communication programs designed to inform activists and maintain their ongoing involvement in the grassroots movement." Synhorst was one of Ramhurst's field operators.

Timothy N. Hyde, another DCI employee, was the senior director of public issues at R.J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997. Hyde oversaw all of RJR's PR campaigns. His weekly reports, also available in the R.J. Reynolds online archive, provide a running history of the discussion of tobacco in the public sphere and the industry's efforts to shape that discussion.

With Goodyear's expertise at coordinating astroturf activities in all 50 states, Synhorst's on-the-ground field experience combined with his telemarketing work, and Hyde's years of corporate work, the DCI Group offers clients a vast body of experience and contacts. The tobacco industry's efforts in the 1990s to fight regulations, taxs and lawsuits created a money-soaked training ground where dozens of political operatives and strategists learned their craft. Since most of the anti-tobacco efforts were led by Democrats, tobacco industry money began flowing primarily into Republican coffers, further strengthening ties between GOP political advisors and the underworld of fake grassroots campaigning.

All these factors have made the DCI Group and its sibling companies a natural choice to help top U.S. companies such as Microsoft and highly-regulated sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry as they, too, have sought to fend off regulators, consumer advocates, and trial lawyers.

Macro Money from Microsoft

Microsoft's decision to hire DCI came as the company faced an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Justice Department in the 1990s. By 2000, Microsoft was spending millions of dollars on contributions to Republican and Democratic campaign war chest, think tanks, and ostensibly independent trade associations as well as on payments to high-powered lobbyists, public relations, and political operatives. Hoping to sway public opinion and the opinion of state and federal officials, the software giant built up a wide network of supporters, with its sponsorship of those groups mostly invisible to the public.

"Microsoft has contributed to established research groups with free-market orientations, including the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute, which have produced studies and newspaper opinion pieces supportive of the company's legal position," the New York Times reported in June 2000. "But Microsoft has also created new trade groups, the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) and Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), to generate support for the company through Web sites and a sophisticated and largely hidden grassroots lobbying campaign."

ACT and ATL remain closely affiliated today. ATL claims to be a "broad-based coalition of technology professionals, consumers and organizations dedicated to limiting government regulation of technology and fostering competitive market solutions to public policy issues affecting the technology industry." In reality, however, it is mostly a shill for Microsoft. Four out of ten of ATL's other "founding members" - Association for Competitive Technology, Citizens Against Government Waste, 60Plus Association, and Small Business Survival Committee - are themselves industry-funded organizations that consistently take their sponsors' positions. Other founders include CompTIA, a computer trade association; and the big box stores CompUSA and Staples. These natural allies served as useful window dressing for an organization whose main issue was defending Microsoft against antitrust action.

Joshua Micah Marshall described the ties among ACT, ATL, DCI and Microsoft in the July 17, 2000 American Prospect. He noted that "while Microsoft did confirm that Synhorst's DCI had been retained as a consultant, it insisted that another DCI employee, Tim Hyde, and not Synhorst, was handling the company's account. In any event, the web of connections among DCI, ATL, and Microsoft is striking. While working for Microsoft, DCI has also provided consulting services to ATL." Josh Mathis, who was installed by ACT president Jonathan Zuck as ATL's executive director, "is also an employee of DCI, who still works out of the same Washington, D.C., office as Synhorst and Hyde."

ATL's domain name, techleadership.org, is registered to ACT. The site itself is hosted by Synhorst and Tom Stock's LLC, TSE Enterprises. TSE and Stock's other company Network Processing Services, LLC (which owns TSE's domain name) are connected to the websites of several industry-backed grassroots groups that advocate positions favorable to DCI clients. TSE's website describes its work as "engineering web sites and portals, interactive multi-media, and electronic direct marketing campaign for public relations, public affairs, and political groups nationwide."

I Get Letters from Dead People

In August 2001 the Los Angeles Times reported that ATL was behind a "carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement" behind Microsoft. "The campaign, orchestrated by a group partly funded by Microsoft, goes to great lengths so that the letters appear to be spontaneous expressions from ordinary citizens. Letters sent in the last month are printed on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces - details that distinguish those efforts from common lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day." Although FLS-DCI has not publicly claimed responsibility for generating the letters, they are consistent with the company's own description of the word produced by its "letter desk" service: "all unique, but conveying your desired message."

According to the Times, the campaign was discovered when Utah's Attorney General at the time, Mark Shurtleff, received letters "purportedly written by at least two dead people . . . imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly. The pleas, along with about 400 others from Utah citizens," included at least one from the nonexistent city of Tucson, Utah.

Even living residents of real cities who wrote letters supporting Microsoft later complained that they had been snookered. Some who were called "believed the states themselves were soliciting their views, according to the attorneys general of Minnesota, Illinois and Utah. When a caller started asking Minnesotan Nancy Brown questions about Microsoft, she thought she was going to get help figuring out what was wrong with her computer," according to the Los Angeles Times. Another Minnesota resident contacted the state's attorney general to tell him, "I sure was misled."

Eighteen states' attorneys general were joining with the Justice Department in its anti-trust suit against Microsoft. Iowa's Attorney General Tom Miller reported receiving more than 50 letters in support of Microsoft during the summer of 2001. "No two letters are identical, but the giveaway lies in the phrasing," the Times wrote. "Four Iowa letters included this sentence: 'Strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry.' Three others use exactly these words: 'If the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.'"

The Times credited a DCI affiliate, DCI/New Media, with assisting Microsoft's "grass-roots" campaign, in concert with the Dewey Square Group, a public affairs firm with close ties to the Democratic Party (see "Dewey Square Gets Around").

Another "coalition" with DCI's fingerprints is Voices for Choices, which appears to front primarily for AT&T. TSE hosts the Voice for Choices website, and AT&T has been a client of DCI Group. In the spring of 2004, VFC ran a campaign seeking to pursuade the Federal Communications Commission and the Bush Administration to appeal a court decision that threw out price caps on rental prices for local telephone lines. While the Baby Bells, who own the local phone lines, applauded the decision, AT&T and MCI/WorldCom were threatened with being priced out of providing local phone services.

Voices for Choices ran ads in Roll Call and other inside-the-beltway publications that hinted at a Bush defeat in November if the administration and FCC did not support an appeal. The White House was not amused with the veiled threat, and Voices for Choices pulled the ads. The Progressive magazine ran another VFC ad in April 2004, which portrayed the organization as a consumer interest group and asked, "Whose Side Are You On? 68,000,000 Americans who now benefit from phone competition. - or - 4 Giant phone companies that would benefit by killing competition."

Journo-Lobbyists

AT&T and Microsoft have found some of their most consistent and enthusiastic support in articles posted on TechCentralStation.com, a quasi-news site that features free-market opinion and analysis pieces. Founded in 2000, Tech Central Station (TCS) is "hosted" by conservative financial columnist James K. Glassman. Shortly before the collapse of the 1990s dot-com bubble, Glassman authored a remarkably nonprophetic work titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank funded by corporations and conservative foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Scaife family foundations. Until recently he was a columnist for the Washington Post, which finally ended the relationship after concluding that Glassman's numerous other entanglements conflicted with his role as a journalist purporting to offer expert financial analysis.

Tech Central Station is a good example of a few of those conflicts of interest, some of which are better disclosed than others. The website openly credits sponsors such as AT&T, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Intel, McDonalds, NASDAQ, National Semiconductor, Qualcomm and PhRMA, but until recently it was reluctant to acknowledge the identity of its real publisher - the DCI Group.

TCS did not publicly disclose its relationship to DCI until it was uncovered by Washington Monthly editor Nicholas Confessore, who wrote about it in December 2003. "After I requested comment, the Web site was changed," Confessore wrote. "Where it formerly stated that 'Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C.,' it now reads 'Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C.'"

The two organizations, Confessore explained, "share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also 'sponsors' of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

"James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying," Confessore continued. "It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence - until now."

What the Burmese Junta and the Drug Industry Have In Common

DCI seems willing to work with some of the most controversial clients in the world. In 2002, it received $340,000 for eight months of work for the Union of Myanmar (Burma) State Peace & Development Council. The Washington Post's Al Kamen wrote, "DCI's filings with the Justice Department offer an unusual glimpse into the efforts by the Rangoon junta. DCI lobbyists, featuring Charles Francis, a longtime family friend of the Bushes, ran a sophisticated campaign to improve the regime's image - and steer the conversation away from its rampant human rights abuses and such."

Francis "even set up two meetings with White House National Security Council Southeast Asia director Karen B. Brooks," Kamen continued, " - an unusual feat given that Burma is under U.S. sanctions and its top officials are barred from coming here - to tout Burma's cooperation on anti-drug, HIV/AIDs and anti-terrorism efforts and in finding the remains of U.S. soldiers from World War II." After lobbying congressional officials, the Defense Department, and well connected think tanks, the "campaign was on the verge of success - the State Department was about to certify the regime - but the administration backed off amid pressure from the Hill, human rights groups and the media."

A more recent example of DCI's work is a campaign to generate positive press for the contentious Medicare act of 2003. The main force behind the Medicare act was the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), one of the country's largest and most influential trade associations. PhRMA spent millions of dollars and used dozens of lobbyists including the DCI Group to get the act passed. Even so, the law was so controversial even among Republican legislators that it barely won approval, even after the party's leadership violated normal voting procedures to push it through. Following its passage, The Hill reported in September 2004 that DCI was "offering healthcare consultants $3,750 plus expenses over six weeks to generate positive news stories about the drug card and offer support to Congress for voting for the Medicare drug law."

According to an email written by the the DCI Group's Starlee Rhoades, the publicity campaign ran from September 15 to October 31. The client behind the campaign, Rhoades wrote, was "RetireSafe, which has sponsored the hiring of healthcare consultants." RetireSafe is a project of the Council for Government Reform, a corporate-backed group that advocates privatization of Social Security and other government services. DCI, asked seniors, their families and healthcare workers "to send letters to their congressman and senators thanking them for supporting the Medicare benefit, or asking for that support in the future. We have help available to write letters if the signer is not comfortable drafting the letter entirely on their own."