Authors: Hedrick Smith
An inside tip can be gold. Right after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, John Gunther, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, got a tip from a cabinet staff aide that the Reagan administration was planning to kill the revenue-sharing program which funneled billions to states, counties, and cities. The timing was serendipitous. The next day a mayor’s delegation was scheduled to lunch with the president. Over lunch, the mayors of Peoria, Indianapolis, Denver, and Columbus, lobbied Reagan and top aides. The program escaped the guillotine for several years, though it was ultimately reduced.
In another case, a former Reagan White House official turned lobbyist told me that a Washington lawyer telephoned him on behalf of a businessman who had a $497,000 cost overrun on a contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In one telephone call, my lobbyist source learned that HUD had already decided to pay the contractor $350,000 and would tell him in about two weeks. My friend phoned the lawyer back, but before he could speak, the lawyer said his client was willing to pay the lobbyist ten percent of whatever he got. My source stopped in mid-sentence and replied, “Well, let me see what I can do.” With some misgivings, but rationalizing that the contractor or the lawyer could have made the same phone call, my source waited a couple of days and then called back to report that the contractor would get $350,000. He never claimed to have fixed the deal, but he got a check for $35,000—for simply knowing whom to ask.
“A lot of it is direct contact,” Christopher Matthews commented. “You see Tip, he’ll be out at a country club playing golf [usually Burning Tree Country Club], and some lobbyist will walk up to him just as he’s about ready to tee up his ball and say, ‘Tip, you know, I got to tell you one thing. Do me one favor. Just don’t push that state-and-local tax thing through on the tax bill.’ You don’t think that has an impression? Of course it does. They know what they’re doing. Tip’s mood can be affected by who the heck he’s seen over the weekend. And these guys do their homework. They know right where these members socialize. You think it’s an accident some guy walks up and talks to Tip on the golf tee? No. It’s smart. It’s natural. It’s easy.”
That is classic old-breed lobbying, and as an old-breed politician, Tip O’Neill was particularly susceptible. Indeed, practically no politician is immune to the flattery and personal attention that are the essence of old-breed lobbying. I remember an article in 1978 about Tongsun Park, a Korean lobbyist who had been close to O’Neill and who wound up getting several other congressmen indicted for taking illegal campaign contributions from a foreigner. But the article, by William Greider in
The Washington Post
, was emphasizing something else: Park’s simple but shrewd understanding that politicians need to feel loved.
“Park exploited this weakness with his Georgetown parties and gifts, but that hardly makes him unique,” Greider wrote.
The most effective lobbies on Capitol Hill, whether it is the Pentagon or the Farm Bureau, have always been the ones that played most skillfully to the Congressmen’s egos. The military treats them like generals, flies them around in big airplanes and fires off rocket shows to entertain them. The Farm Bureau awards them plaques and holds banquets in their honor. Politicians are not different in this respect from the rest of us, except that many of them have a stronger personal need for ego gratification. It’s what drew them into politics in the first place, the roar of the crowd and all that.
Now, picture a scrambling politician who works his way up the local ladder, who finally wins a coveted seat in Congress and comes to Washington to collect his glory. The first thing he discovers is that glory gets spread pretty thin in this town.… He hardly ever sees his name in the daily newspaper unless he gets into trouble or creates an outrageous media stunt which the press can’t resist. When he opens the mail from home, it is a hot blast of complaints, demands, threats. In the last decade, his status has declined considerably, displaced by the new celebrities who dominate Washington’s glitter: movie stars, cause advocates, rock musicians, even members of the news media. In this environment, politicians, some of them anyway, will behave like the rest of us—they will devote their attention to people who appreciate them. Lobbyists appreciate Congressmen. They thank them constantly for their hard work. They provide them with the trappings, however phony, of exalted status. They protect a Congressman, with small favors, while the rest of the world beats up on him.
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Old-breed lobbying also thrives on an aura of influence, a promise of the inside track, the hint of priceless contacts. A certain amount of this promise of influence is hokum. There is no year-in, year-out box-score, but even the big-name lobbyist “rainmakers” lose major battles or settle for much less than they had hoped for. “One of the great myths around is that wheelers and dealers can come in there and write policy and have their way in whatever they want—it’s simply not the case,” asserts Norm Ornstein, one of the best-known scholars on Congress, who is at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. “You pick any big shot, and you’re dealing with
some
wins and losses. Any sophisticated person is going to know that you hire a Tommy Boggs, and that doesn’t mean you buy victory. What you buy with a Tommy Boggs is access. Very few people are gonna say they
won’t see him. You buy acumen. This is somebody who understands how the process works.”
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Ornstein’s skepticism is well taken, for lobbyists are prone to oversell their influence; but his assertion that lobbyists do not write policy is too sweeping. Their effectiveness, suggested David Cohen, codirector of the Advocacy Institute, depends largely on the public visibility of issues. Large issues like the MX missile, environmental legislation, the Voting Rights Act, or broad provisions of tax law are “less susceptible to the superlobbyists because they are highly visible,” Cohen argues—correctly, I think. “But when you’re dealing with invisible issues and the narrower details of legislation, you can still use the superlawyers and the superlobbyists.”
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Access is the first arrow in any lobbyist’s quiver, especially lobbyists of the old breed. Scores of times I have been told that votes are won simply by gaining an audience with a time-harassed congressman, so he could hear your case. In this access game, the lobbyist’s first rule is to make his own services so reliable and indispensable that officeholders become dependent on him—for his information, his contacts, his policy advice, not to mention his money. “A good lobbyist is simply an extension of a congressional member’s staff,” I was told by Terry Lierman, an energetic health lobbyist and former staff aide for the Senate Appropriations Committee. “If you’re a good lobbyist and you’re working something, all the members know where you’re coming from,” Lierman said. “So if they want information and they trust you, they’ll call
you
for that information.”
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That takes expertise. For instance, Representative Tony Coelho, a California Democrat, pointed out how lobbyists work hand in glove with the members and staffs of the highly specialized subcommittees of the House Agriculture Committee. They help craft legislation that covers their own sector. “There are lobbyists who are extremely influential in the subcommittees,” Coelho asserted. “They know more about the subject than the staff or the committee members. The Cotton Council will be writing legislation for the cotton industry in the cotton subcommittee.”
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A top real estate lobbyist explained the premium value of expertise in the final stages of writing a tax bill and why lobbyists gather by the score outside the committee room. “There are very arcane, very turgid, complicated sections of the tax code, and members and their staffs often are not as familiar with how they apply to the industry as we are,” explained Wayne Thevnot, president of the National Realty Committee. “So if you’ve got entree there and you understand the process and
you’re present, you can influence the specific drafting of these proposals. Staff and others will come out and seek you out in the halls and say, ‘We’re on the passive-loss provision, and this is the material-participation test that the staff is proposing. Does that work? Does that solve your problem? And, if not, how can we correct it?’ ”
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AIPAC has institutionalized its influence through this technique. Tom Dine and other staffers draft speeches and legislation for many members of both House and Senate, offering detailed rundowns on the Arab-Israeli military balance, or doing spot checks on Middle Eastern visitors. “We’ll get a call from a congressional staffer, say at nine in the morning, and they want a speech on an issue,” one midlevel AIPAC legislative assistant disclosed. “By ten-thirty, they’ll have a speech.” AIPAC has a research staff of fifteen people, well-stocked with papers on many topical issues. Practically every senator or House member known as a spokesman on Israeli issues and scores of lesser lights have leaned on this service or gotten AIPAC’s staff to ghostwrite or edit op-ed articles on Middle East issues.
Charles Peters, in his slim and knowing handbook on Washington,
How Washington
Really
Works
, argues that the name of the game for politicians and administration officials is survival, and lobbyists work to become an integral part of the survival networks of people in power. “The smart lobbyist knows he must build networks not only for himself, but for those officials he tries to influence,” Peters wrote. “Each time the lobbyist meets an official whose help he needs, he tries to let that official know—in the most subtle ways possible—that he can be an important part of that official’s survival network.”
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Ultimately, that urge to prove a vital part of an officeholder’s network gets into campaign money and demonstrating clout with the voters. And that begins to bridge from the old inside game of lobbying to the new outside game.
New-Breed Lobbying
The new-breed game reflects the organic changes in American politics and the institutional changes in Congress. Its medium is mass marketing; its style is packaging issues; its hallmark is wholesale lobbying. New-breed lobbying borrows heavily from the techniques of political campaigns, with their slick P.R., television advertising, orchestrated coalitions, targeted mass mailings, and their crowds of activists. It is the National Rifle Association generating three million telegrams in seventy-two hours and blanketing Capitol Hill with so many phone calls
that members cannot make outgoing calls. It is the “gray lobby” dumping up to fifteen million postcards and letters on Jim Wright in one day to warn Congress not to tamper with Social Security cost-of-living adjustments. It is legions of insurance or real estate lobby agents swarming Capitol Hill as a tax markup nears a climax. It is political consultants and campaign strategists elbowing superlawyers aside, to generate grass-roots support for their lobbying clients or to do public-relations campaigns.
For example, when Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader, wanted to push his cause in Washington in late 1985 and to bring pressure on Congress and the administration to supply him with missiles to combat Soviet tanks and jets, he paid a fancy $600,000 fee to Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, a hot-shot lobbying firm set up by a group of young political campaign managers and consultants. The firm, whose campaign work gave it ties to the Reagan White House and influential Republican senators, not only arranged entrée at the highest levels of the administration and Congress, but it orchestrated a massive public-relations blitz for Savimbi. In his two-week visit, the jaunty, bearded anti-Communist rebel had scores of press interviews and television appearances. Suddenly Savimbi became a cause célèbre, which helped him get the weapons.
There are literally hundreds of deals like these, tapping the ranks of political campaign specialists for lobbying. That is an important shift away from reliance on lawyers and former government officials for lobbying—a shift symptomatic of how the new politics have altered the Washington power game.
The essence of the new-breed game is grass-roots lobbying. It developed in the 1960s with the advent of citizen protest. The civil rights movement, mass marches against the Vietnam War, and then Ralph Nader and public-interest groups such as Common Cause opened up mass lobbying. Those movements spawned a new generation, a new cadre of players trained in grass-roots activism, many of whom settled into the Washington power game. Business was initially slow to react, but it arrived with a vengeance to play on the new terrain in the late 1970s and gained the upper hand in the 1980s. Now old-breed and new-breed lobbyists jostle, borrowing techniques from each other.
The new game has made lobbying a boom industry. It takes a lot more money and manpower than it did in the old days to touch all the power bases in Congress, and the campaign techniques of working the grass roots shoot costs up exponentially. The swarm of lobbyists in Washington seems to reach new highs every year: from 5,662 registered
with the secretary of the Senate in 1981 to 23,011 in mid-1987 (registration is required to work the halls of Congress legally), plus another fifty or sixty thousand more lobbyists and workers in law firms and trade association offices. In the new Washington, practically no big client will settle these days for a single lobbying firm. The style now is “team lobbying” to make all the necessary contacts and to handle all aspects of the influence game: a law firm, a public-relations outfit, a lobbying firm, plus grass-roots political specialists.
One hallmark of new-breed lobbying is its strange political bedfellows. With Congress split for six of the past eight years between a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-dominated Senate, bipartisan lobbying coalitions became a necessity. Even in 1978, when the Chrysler Corporation was looking for a government bailout loan, it pulled together a big Democratic law firm (Patton, Boggs and Blow) and a big Republican lobbying firm (Timmons and Company). The latest pattern is for each firm to have its own in-house bipartisan coalition. For example, Bill Timmons—who regularly runs Republican national conventions—hired Democratic lobbyists such as Bill Cable from the Carter White House staff and Howard Paster, formerly with the United Auto Workers union.