THE PLANK DECEMBER 15, 2008
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In his Washington Post column today, Robert Samuelson attempts to make the case that lobbyists--vilified throughout the campaign as corrupt peddlers of sleaze--are in fact the nation's unsung defenders of the poor:
A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that. Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants...the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.
Just last month, former GOP majority leader Trent Lott valiantly tried to make the same argument in defense of his new profession (as I describe in my story in the current issue of TNR). But what both Samuelson and Lott conveniently ignore is that lobbyists for America's poor are hardly the major players on K Street; in fact, they're mostly muscled around by the corporate lobbyists--the kind who can "afford the cost" of enormously expensive campaigns to sway policy and legislation.
Last year, the pharmaceutical industry alone spent $168 million on lobbying Capitol Hill. By contrast, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities--which the Post has previously championed as a fiscally-minded "powerhouse for the poor"--has a total annual budget of $13 million, mostly devoted to producing wonkish reports on topics like food stamps and state budgets. Though they have tried to influence federal budget decisions, CBPP is primarily a think-tank, not an advocacy group--and to argue that the group's political clout is comparable to a lobby like PhRMA or the National Association of Manufacturers is blatantly absurd.
Samuelson also fights against the notion that lobbyists, armed with buckets of campaign cash, woo legislators based on access and friendly relationships alone. "Lobbying is much more substantive and out in the open than its ugly caricature," one of his sources says. "Lobbyists primarily woo lawmakers with facts." Well, it's certainly true that lobbying across the board has become more substantive in nature, as I also discuss in my piece. But as much as Samuelson may want to believe otherwise, this hasn't always been the case: Abramoff wasn't so much an aberration as the unfortunate consequence of the culture of favor-trading that characterized Delay's K Street Project. While some of the anti-lobbying stereotypes may be unfair, they didn't just materialize out of nowhere. These criticisms ultimately helped push through ethics reforms that have altered the culture of the lobbying industry--along with the return of Democratic rule and the promise of unprecedented government involvement in a wide range of industries.
So, yes, lobbyists are more likely these days to rely on fact-based arguments and policy expertise to sway lawmakers. But that doesn't change the fact that corporate lobbyists still have outsized pocketbooks and disproportionately powerful players to make their case.
--Suzy Khimm
4 comments
Wasn't it called Gucci Gulch when they were queing outside Dan Rostenkowski's (D-IL, Chicago no less) offices?
- jemerk
December 15, 2008 at 9:27pm
I read Samuelson's column as well. And, yes, like most political sleights of mind there are always going to be a few kernals of truth buried in the rhetoric somewhere.
Who can argue that lobbyists do not represent all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons? And while lots of these Delay/Abramoff/Cunningham transactions do revolve around a naked quid pro quo money for legislation [or no legislation], other lobbyists don't go in that direction at all; and many do offer valuable information regarding the consequences of passing or not passing a particular piece of legislation.
What Samuelson seeks to do, however, is to encompass the meaning of lobbying so broadly, that practically any narrative can be yanked out of it to make a case for or against practically everything.
But then he almost always skips the part about the revolving doors. He doesn't mention, for example, the manner in which Cheney and Bush all but invited industries over to write the legislation that regulated them. He doesn't draw our attention to confabs like the 2001 energy meetings between Bush, Cheney and the big energy corporations; which included, among others, Ken Lay of Enron. He doesn't talk about the two way traffic between Congress and K Street, between the White House and K Street. Instead, as you noted, these are played up more as the exceptions to the rule.
But support for corporate lobbying isn't just about the money for some conservatives. George Will for instance is particularly rabid about dismantling public funding for elections. Will wraps his points in the noble cloak of free speech. He insists that big corporations have just as much right to spend millions and millions of dollars in fees to lobbying firms to express their own political interests as you and I have to write letters or emails to our representatives.
After all, when election day comes, these guys get but one vote just like all the rest of us, right?
Will's perspective, however, runs even deeper into the plutocratic agenda. Will has [in my view] a visceral distaste for democracy that goes beyond the parameters of many we call the Founding Fathers. Back then many voters had to be of the landed gentry in order to cast a ballot. And from this mindset came the electoral college and 2 Senators per state as well.
Hell, even Sarah Palin didn't pass Will's smell test this year.
george walton
- iambiguous
December 15, 2008 at 10:56pm
money is obviously an important tool of political persuasion. however, it is not the only, or even the most powerful. the aarp has a huge membership, many of whom have the time and will to write their legislators, making aarp one of the most - if not the most - powerful lobbying group in the country. money is an advantage, but so is membership size and organization.
- ILANSANDBER
December 16, 2008 at 12:03pm
ILANSANDBER writes:
money is obviously an important tool of political persuasion. however, it is not the only, or even the most powerful. the aarp has a huge membership, many of whom have the time and will to write their legislators, making aarp one of the most - if not the most - powerful lobbying group in the country. money is an advantage, but so is membership size and organization.
George responds:
AARP, the Business Roundtable, SEIU and NFIB are currently joined together in the Divided We Fail campaign. I suspect these organizations are so deeply interwined in a bipartisan relationship between government, insurance, health care, senior issues etc., that untangling the connections enough to shed the light needed to make the relationships transparent would be difficult to say the least. Are they de facto GSEs? I don't know.
How are they connected to the insurance and health care industries? I don't know. How is this reconciled with those who support it from SEIU? I don't know. But any organization that makes life a bit easier for the elderly can't be as be nearly as morally problematic as other lobbyists are.
But then I don't really know how the pieces fit together.
george walton
- iambiguous
December 16, 2008 at 6:51pm