Charlie Black will head new lobbying firm

The lobbyist who wasn’t a lobbyist during last year’s presidential campaign will head up a newly created Washington lobbying firm.

In March 2008, Charles R. Black Jr., left his post as chairman of BKSH & Associates to serve as senior adviser to Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate.

Early this year, he returned to BKSH. Now he will serve as the chairman of Prime Policy Group, a company created by the merger of BKSH and Timmons & Co., another powerhouse Washington lobby shop.

Black, who is 61 and is known as Charlie, told Politico that combining the companies should create new business.

“For both firms’ clients, it adds more value and more heavyweight lobbyists to help them out,” he said.

The merger suggests that despite anti-lobbying rhetoric from both the campaigns of McCain and Barack Obama in 2008, lobbying lives on in Washington.

The key to success would seem to be to a have a firm positioned to play both sides of the political aisle.

As Politico notes, Prime Policy has 11 senior lobbyists who are Republicans, 13 who are Democrats.

Black, who was one of the founders of BKSH, has solid Republican credentials, having served as a senior adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and as an adviser to both George W. Bush campaigns.

Republican Bryce L. Harlow, the former Timmons CEO who will be Prime Policy’s vice chairman, served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

On the Democratic side, R. Scott Pastrick, Prime Policy’s president and CEO, who had a similar title at BKSH, served in the Jimmy Carter administration. He also worked on the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campalgn.

Martin P. Paone, Prime Policy’s executive vice president and a former Timmons lobbyist, was a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, primarily in the Senate, for 32 years.

Prior to the merger, BKSH was a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. Burson-Marsteller, in turn, was a subsidiary of WPP Group.

Timmons and company had been a subsidiary of WPP.

With the merger, Prime Policy becomes a subsidiary of Burston-Marsteller, which is headed by Mark J. Penn, a Democrat who was the chief strategist for the 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

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