Earlier this month, Wonkette's Anonymous Lobbyist columnist outed herself as Megan Carpentier, a onetime lobbyist for the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association and Crowell & Moring. Carpentier, 30, is now an associate editor at Wonkette, the widely read D.C. gossip site. The post revealing her identity has gotten more than 12,000 page views since it went up (complete with saucy pictures of Carpentier).
The Anonymous Lobbyist herself says she's ignoring her new fast-paced Web gig, and says she knew that when she went public as Wonkette's inside columnist, she was probably walking away from a future in lobbying.
"I didn’t take the job thinking I could go back," she says now. Carpentier says some of her regular readers noticed she was "burnt out," and says that in the end, her old jobs weren't the right fit. She graduated from Georgetown University with a master's degree in 2001 and took a job to pay the bills, she says, but they weren't the right fit and her more entry-level jobs weren't paying what many think of as bigtime K Street money. She wrote the Anonymous Lobbyist column for wonkette.com for more than a year, and says she saw a misperception "that lobbyists run everything. It's so much more this chaotic free-for-all" that lobbyists influence, but don't control, she says.
Carpentier says she was laid off from her most recent job with a nonprofit in September, and when she had the chance to turn her column into a full-time gig with Wonkette, she took it. So there's one less lobbyist in town, guys - but she's keeping an eye on you.
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