Schmoozing and Snoozing
Gifford, Bill
Schmoozing and Snoozing Lobbying isn't just sleazy work—it's tedious too by Bill Gifford The Lobbyists. Jeffrey Birnbaum. Times, $25In the 1920s, Arkansas Senator Thaddeus Caraway launched an...
...The corporate client shells out a few hundred bucks an hour in hopes of securing tax breaks worth millions, even billions...
...What emerges is a new portrait of the profession as a technocratic, unglamorous, at times humiliating business (even if most of the drinks are 56 The Washington Monthly/January/February 1993 free...
...If you spend your time with millionaires, you begin to think like them...
...change is the only constant here, and change keeps lobbyists in business...
...The collapse of Communism is as much a challenge to liberalism as it is to socialism...
...One result," Birnbaum writes, "is that corporate America, once a perennial sacrificial lamb when it came to government crackdowns, has become something of a sacred cow...
...We're left with an occasionally diverting catalogue of lobbyist tricks, which include bilking the client, bilking the other guy's client, duping Congress, and fleecing taxpayers...
...William Grei-der describes this erosion in his slightly preachy Who Will Tell the People...
...Lucid and graceful....A fascinating window on the cold war, seen through the eyes of a giant...
...Birnbaum documents more than one instance of congressmen displaying fealty to lobbyists over their own constituents...
...capital-gains preacher Charts Walker and his underling, Mark Bloomfield...
...Gucci Gucci And who do the millionaire lobbyists think like...
...The author clearly deserves some sort of medal for journalistic bravery simply for enduring two years with the likes of dreary Stuart Eizenstat...
...At least, that's one conclusion Jeffrey Birnbaum nudges readers toward in his closely observed study of the influence industry...
...Maglev railway fanatic Wayne Thevenot...
...The dividends are his detailed accounts of the lobbyists' strategizing over weeks, months, even years...
...The holy bovine was milked once, via the 1986 tax-reform bill that hiked corporate taxes $120 billion over five years...
...even though they haven't wielded real power for decades, if ever...
...Evan Thomas, The New York Times Book Review lllus...
...This is like attempting to cover a hurricane while ignoring what it blows down...
...Mervyn Dymally, Don Sundquist, and Louis Stokes of Ohio also attended that same inconsequential press conference...
...Lobbyists greatly outnumbered journalists in the room...
...and truckers' lobbyist Tom Donohue, who devotes his working life to battling excise taxes on diesel fuel...
...Some may bilk their own clients, like their unsophisticated forebears, but most now concentrate on fleecing taxpayers (the wage-earning sort), duping Congress, and ambushing their competitors' clients...
...tax code . . . nine out of ten American families would be paying less," he wrote, citing a 1990 Citizens for Tax Justice study...
...Thanks to the many energetic lobbyists representing cigarettes, liquor, beer, boats, tuxedos, candy, soda pop, meat, chicken, fruit, cars, trucks, bicycles, motion pictures, concrete, manufactured housing, real-estate agents, televisions, computers, cellular phones, cheese, wine, and anything else that can be bought, sold, and consumed—all of whom would fight such a VAT to the death—it'll never happen...
...Why weren't they busy legislating...
...Today's lobbyists have branched out...
...For one thing, the two The Future of Liberal Revolution Bruce A. Ackerman In this timely and important book, a leading legal and political philosopher examines the renewed possibilities for the spread of democratic liberalism now that the Cold War has ended and new orders emerge after the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe...
...Post and Robins provide incisive analysis and useful recommendations for both doctors and policymakers...
...The lure of media attention, perhaps...
...Williams and Rep...
...Both books confirm that loopholes and tax giveaways are much easier to open than they are to close, at least where powerful corporate interests are involved...
...Lobbyists have come a long way since the Caraway committee pawed through the Washington Bill Gifford is an associate editor of the Washington City Paper...
...Birnbaum punctures the new stereotype as well as the old image of the cigar-chomping fat cat doling out cash for votes...
...Well, no...
...Today, they stoke the publicity machine...
...Boredom was the price of his remarkable access to the luminaries of Washington's political netherworld...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Yawn...
...His latest effort charts the lobbyists' efforts to reopen some of the loopholes they lost then and to widen existing ones...
...58 The Washington Monthly/January/February 1993...
...This book's shortcomings are disappointingly obvious, given the skillful narrative and penetrating insight of Gucci Gulch...
...If Congress had done nothing since 1977 to alter the U.S...
...For The Lobbyists, he spent the better part of two years shadowing a half-dozen of Washington's top corporate lobbyists as they shepherded their pet causes through the tumultuous 101st Congress...
...As one Hill aide puts it to Birnbaum, "Who do these guys hang out with...
...Other extracurricular activities—"work" to the lobbyists —range from the nightly lobbyist-funded cocktails-and-hors d'oeuvres soirees to expense-account dinners (all reported on the lobbyists' "disclosure" forms, of course) to more complicated recreational pursuits...
...Yet, paradoxically, the government would be collecting more revenue each year—almost $70 billion more—if none of those tax bills had been enacted...
...Ackerman argues eloquently for liberal revolutions that will not only achieve, but also preserve, human freedom...
...What this does to everyone else's tax burden, not to mention the deficit, is left unanswered...
...The Lobbyists is gimped by a structure that flits from capital gains to Jim Wright's woes to excise taxes to HUD...
...But by focusing too intently on how his lobbyists get the job done, Birnbaum lets a bigger story get away, namely, the way they have monopolized the crucial debate over tax and spending priorities...
...Congressmen are allowed to have fun, of course...
...Of the 400 or so lobby groups active in Washington, the Caraway committee concluded that 90 percent were fakes, set up for the primary purpose of bilking clients...
...What's amazing is that Reps...
...What they sell is not access, or influence, but a chance in the great American tax lottery...
...Birnbaum gets at what corporate America really wants from Congress: not pork spending, but tax breaks...
...You can hardly open The Washington Post's Style section or Washingtonian without tripping over yet another breathless profile of Bob Gray, Frank Mankiewicz, or Jack Valenti, who go through the motions of power-brokering (limos to the Hill, cellular-phoning, etc...
...It's as though the CBS Olympic crew somehow seized control of C-Span...
...When House Democrats retreat to the Greenbrier for three days, lobbyists tag along, paying $6,000 each for a weekend of jitterbugging, skeet-shooting, and "When we get back, there's a little something I'd like to talk to you about...
...As Jim Wright was going down the tubes, for example, his lawyer actually lobbied a group of blue-chip lobbyists in a futile bid to keep the Speaker's job...
...Birnbaum recounted the story of tax reform in the much more searching Showdown at Gucci Gulch, written with Wall Street Journal colleague Alan Murray...
...This is the new Co-dependent Congress...
...Times, $25In the 1920s, Arkansas Senator Thaddeus Caraway launched an inquiry into the then-nascent profession of lobbying...
...Meanwhile, back at the Ways and Means drafting session...
...How does life go on for the body politic when its leaders are incapacitated...
...Still, a few lobbyists bravely bear the torch for a new age of regression, notably Charls Walker and his American Council for Capital Formation, who since the seventies has pursued one drastic goal: to replace most income, investment, and corporate taxation with a consumption-based VAT, lifting the tax burden from investors and businesses and nailing consumers...
...phone book to find them...
...Les Aspin January/February 1993/The Washington Monthly 57 groups spend an unhealthy amount of time together: workdays, evening receptions, weekend and recess junkets...
...Lobbyist J.D...
...Especially good is the section on Coretech, Eizenstat's front group of universities seeking tax handouts for research and development—to benefit Coretech's corporate backers, who ought to be doing R&D with or without write-offs...
...Lee H. Hamilton "A readable and important book...
...Their corporate clients...
...Birnbaum's detailed catalogue of each of these tools of the trade illustrates how lobbyists prosper no matter who presides in the White House or sits in Congress...
...And a majority of the importunists started as staffers on the Hill, the closest thing to grad school for lobbying...
...The politician-lobbyist affair shows all the danger signs described in self-help books...
...Beryl Anthony together founded a duck-hunting club on Maryland's Eastern Shore...
...If successful, the lobbyist can earn more for the company than its most productive employee...
...But by constantly consorting with lobbyists— and depending upon them for fundraising and for information (not to mention the occasional Jet-Ski rental)—Congress comes to view the world through their tinted contact lenses...
...Or at the very least, tax hikes for someone else...
...More likely, what drew the lawmakers out of their offices was a perverse sense of loyalty...
...Wright should have known better: When the first-class cabin fills with smoke, lobbyists are always the first to grab parachutes...
...It was a good choice of sport for Williams, with many duckless hours in which to talk shop and a lower level of frustration than golf...
...Inexplicably, The Lobbyists all but ignores the result of this loophole—jockeying: a government that hemorrhages revenue while imposing an ever greater tax burden upon most of its citizens...
...Taking advantage of the taxpayers isn't as easy as it was when deficits were small and the press's pork detectors disconnected...
...It's a job more like accounting or real estate than being a movie star...
...Rich people...
...Two magical words are never uttered: "corporate responsibility...
...Alan Wolfe Courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Dean Acheson The Cold War Years, 1953-71 Douglas Brinkley "A splendid study of that bold and bristling figure as he observed foreign affairs in his outspoken years of so-called retirement...
...Yale University Press 92A Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520 When Illness Strikes the Leader The Dilemma of the Captive King Jerrold M. Post, M.D., and Robert S. Robins In this absorbing book, two experts in political psychology reveal how the infirmities of leaders have affected their own societies and the broader course of world events...
...Birnbaum deserves special commendation for suffering through such events as a press conference of the Coalition Against Regressive Taxation, a gang of brewers, distillers, cigarette makers, and trucking companies all bravely fighting excise taxes in the name of Joe Six-Pack...
...good-time Bobby Juliano, champion of the three-martini-lunch...
...But Congress just can't keep its mitts off the tax code...
...When Anthony needed cash in the late eighties, Birnbaum reports, another lobbyist gladly bought him out...
...Most lobbyists have to be contented with a loophole here and a credit there...
...This short book is long on wisdom...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 1
