The Republican presidential primary doesn’t hit Georgia until March, but it has been raging inside 303 Peachtree St. N.E. for months.
From their offices on the top floors of the 60-story SunTrust Plaza downtown, top lawyers at McKenna Long Aldridge have been working to elect their guy as the Republican nominee for president. But they’re not all backing the same guy.
McKenna Long — home to former ambassadors, governors, congressmen, state lawmakers and presidential candidates — also fields some power players in both the Gingrich and Romney campaigns.
Working for Newt Gingrich is Randy Evans, the former U.S. House speaker’s longtime lawyer, who has also done work for Gov. Nathan Deal. Gingrich’s election-related legal work is done by McKenna Long’s Stefan Passantino, who is based at the firm’s Washington office — on K Street, naturally. The firm’s Atlanta roster includes pollster Matt Towery, a former Gingrich campaign chairman.
Meanwhile, on the other side, senior managing director in Atlanta, Eric Tanenblatt, is a national finance co-chairman and top Georgia adviser to Mitt Romney. Also helping on the Romney campaign is Cindy Gillespie, who also is based in Washington and was a senior policy adviser to Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Rusty Paul, who heads the government affairs team at another well-known Atlanta firm, Arnall Golden Gregory, said it’s hard for McKenna Long to lose in the March 6 primary.
“It’s kind of like buying a lottery ticket with every potential number. You are going to win somewhere,” Paul said.
Holland &Knight partner and GOP activist Robert Highsmith agreed. “They are the ones who are really wired this time around,” Highsmith said of McKenna Long.
But such political connections have long been the norm for McKenna Long Aldridge.
“Our vision has always focused on the intersection of business and government,” Tanenblatt said.
The fact that McKenna Long Aldridge will likely wind up on the right side of the Republican race only shows how much things have changed here in the past decade.
During the 1990s, what was then Long, Aldridge & Norman was a political power firm in Atlanta, but that muscle was tied to Democrats, especially President Bill Clinton and Gov. Zell Miller. One partner was chairman of the state Democratic Party. Another was Clinton’s ambassador to Canada. The firm’s Keith Mason was both Miller’s chief of staff and a top Clinton aide.
But in late 1994, Long Aldridge also brought on Towery, a 1990 GOP lieutenant governor candidate and Gingrich’s campaign chairman in 1992.
When Democrats lost the White House after the 2000 elections and Republicans began rising in the statehouse, the GOP roster began to grow at Long Aldridge. Tanenblatt worked on the George W. Bush presidential campaign and signed on shortly after the election. Evans, Gingrich’s longtime lawyer and advisor, and Passantino joined the firm in 2003 after it had merged with McKenna & Cuneo.
McKenna Long’s roster continues to include Democratic heavy hitters, but the 2000s brought a balance to the firm.
Tanenblatt left for a while to serve as top aide to Sonny Perdue after Perdue upset Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes in 2002.
Besides being Gingrich’s lawyer, Evans represented Gov. Nathan Deal in ethics investigations in 2010 and 2011. The firm has done campaign legal work for many state lawmakers and state officials, receiving more than $200,000 in payments over the past two years, according to disclosures.
It has also been paid about $300,000 by the Gingrich campaign for campaign legal work.
Evans’ relationship with Gingrich dates to their days at West Georgia College. Evans was a student there when he met Gingrich, a professor and aspiring congressman.
Evans volunteered to work on Gingrich’s successful 1978 campaign and lived in the basement of the congressman’s Virginia home while he interned for Gingrich in Washington.
He compares this presidential race to the one in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the nomination and went on to defeat Jimmy Carter. Gingrich, he said, “is the one person who presents the best opportunity to debate and beat Barack Obama in the fall.”
Tanenblatt got to know Romney through his work with the Republican Governors Association. Romney chaired the group when Perdue, Tanenblatt’s boss, was vice chairman.
When Romney decided to run for president a few years later, Tanenblatt said he was among those who met in Utah to plot the race.
“When I first got to know Mitt, there was an instant connection,” he said. “The thing that has really inspired me about him is this is a guy who has built a career on turning things around. To me, he’s not your typical politician.”
With so many politically connected partners and staffers, Tanenblatt said politics is regularly discussed at the office. “But obviously, I don’t get involved in Newt’s legal work and they don’t get involved in my stuff,” he said.
Evans said that, with so many high-profile attorneys and staffers in the house, the inter-staff political debates can be pretty high-level.
“There is no real contentiousness to it because we all know we have jobs to do,” he said. “I kid around that it’s like football coaches sitting around talking X’s and O’s.”
The law firm connections may come in handy once the nomination is settled, when the nominee will seek to bring together the supporters of his vanquished foes to take on President Obama this fall.
Democrats in the firm did the same thing in 2008. Mason backed Hillary Clinton, as did McKenna Long partner Gordon Giffin, who was President Clinton’s ambassador to Canada.
“Once Obama won the nomination, the Democrats wound up doing what Randy [Evans] and I will wind up doing with our nominee. They were all supporting Obama,” Tanenblatt said.
Paul said having heavy hitters on the campaigns doesn’t hurt when it comes to marketing a firm’s services.
“It doesn’t necessarily get you much with the administration, but it sure looks impressive when you are talking to clients,” he said.
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