The Super Bowl Of Spin

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is rapidly turning into a massive event, and TPM's Christina Bellantoni gives you a scorecard of the real players that will determine what happens from here:  the public relations firms involved.  This is the Super Bowl of Corporate Spin, folks.  Possibly hundreds of billions of dollars are a stake here...or far more.  It's time to check the numbers on the jerseys, and here's who to watch:

Among the best-known BP reps in Washington is Tony Podesta, brother to former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta. Tony's The Podesta Group lobbies on behalf of BP. We asked their role in the oil spill and they referred all calls back to BP. But we know Podesta has the ear of the White House and of his brother's liberal and influential Center for American Progress.

Also on board is Washington communications consultant Michele Davis of Brunswick Group LLP. BP officials in London referred our calls to her but she hasn't yet gotten back to us. Davis, a former top aide for Hank Paulson's Treasury Department under President George W. Bush, recently spoke with TPM for a story about the 2008 bailout.

Roll Call reported that Brunswick was brought on to help with communications strategy, and director Su-Lin Nichols told the paper: "Tony Hayward has been clear with his entire executive team that BP's focus is stopping the flow of oil, mitigating the impact and keeping the public informed."

Transocean, which owned the rig, declined to comment on which firms it has hired to manage the PR crisis.

Rhonda Barnat of the Abernathy MacGregor Group represents Cameron, the firm which made the blowout preventive device that failed after the explosion. When asked if she was hired specifically for the incident, Barnat told TPM she is "helping" Cameron.

According to her bio, Barnat is trained to provide counsel "to senior management in highly complex and sensitive crises."

Also on deck helping is the American Petroleum Institute, where top lobbyists are working with reporters and writing blogs to frame the incident as an aberration in a safe industry. A spokesman told me today there were no ads on television related to the oil spill - yet. The group is using Twitter and Facebook and a fancy Web site to tell the industry's version of what went wrong. As a side note, API last November hired as executive vice president of government affairs Martin Durbin, Sen. Dick Durbin's nephew.

President Jack Gerard is appearing frequently on television with the talking points that the nation still needs oil and natural gas and that there's been "unprecedented" industry response to help.

The most recent lobbying filing disclosure with the Senate for the first quarter of 2010 showed seven firms that did lobbying on behalf of BP. They are the Podesta Group, the Duberstein Group, DC Legislative & Regulatory Services, the Alpine Group, Thomas Advisors, Stuntz Davis and Staffier and Arnold and Porter.

Keep those names in mind folks:  Tony Podesta, Michele Davis,  Rhonda Barnat, and Jack Gerard.  They're the folks hired to get corporate America off the hook, and get you and I on it for cleaning up their mess and for dealing with the thousands of lost fishing and tourism jobs this will cause.

Pay close attention to Tony Podesta.  If John Podesta's brother is doing the heavy spin lifting for BP specifically, they have a straight line to the White House.  That means the normally dependable Think Progress may not be so dependable, but so far they have been brutal to BP.  We'll see how long that lasts.  Podesta is going to be a major player in this mess in the weeks and months to come, however.  These are the spin shops that will be trying to lessen or eliminate the liabilities of various companies in the rig disaster.

Forewarned is forearmed.  Anyone who gets off the hook this way only means the government and the taxpayer has to foot the bill.