New Rules

New Rules

by MATTHEW BUDMAN | photography by Lucian Perkins

Bob Kaiser explains how lobbyists will talk to politicians in Obama's Washington

What do the impending changes in Washington, D.C., mean for corporations vying to make their voices heard? Everything — and nothing. Robert G. Kaiser, who explores what disgraced über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff called “a system of legalized bribery” in So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (Knopf), sees some elements of the business-government relationship shifting but the system remaining fundamentally intact. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, spoke soon after the election shook up Washington, when every American newspaper except the Post — the company paper in the nation’s company town — was taking a long-deserved breather. Kaiser, 65, was still, and always, on deadline.

All campaign long, both Barack Obama and John McCain railed against lobbyists, pledging to stay clear of corporate influence and “special interests.” Did they go further than previous candidates?
Yes. Lobbying and lobbyists have become targets in a way that they never were before. There has always been a reformist element in Washington — Common Cause-type people who made noises about lobbyists — but it never got much attention until the Abramoff scandal, which changed everything. But it’s intriguing that although, as you said, McCain and Obama both declared independence from lobbyists, McCain depended entirely on guys to run his campaign who are, who will be, and who long have been lobbyists. That was a very interesting reflection of the fact that regardless of what your public rhetoric may be, these guys are entrenched.

It seems as though everyone in Washington has worked as a registered lobbyist at some point.
A lot of them start out working as aides on Capitol Hill or in the executive branch. They like Washington, they like the game, and they discover that they can make very good livings after they leave government doing this lobbying work. The result is this culture of mutual dependence that encourages this revolving-door life.

It’s going to be really fun to watch and see the degree to which Obama can change this. I have a lot of acquaintances among Democratic lobbyists who would love to be in the Obama administration, but it looks like they’re going to be held out. Now, whether they really will be held out is a good question, because a lot of them are very competent people who know the town and know how to make things happen.

The other question for me is whether Obama can impose new rules on his appointees. He could insist on a cooling-off period of two or three years between the time you leave government service and the time you become a lobbyist. That would really alter the game, but it would also alter the culture in ways that people might really rebel against.

Can a politician simply not play the game?
No. There’s no way — nor should there be a way, in a democracy, to prevent people from petitioning the government to advance their own interests and causes. Decisions made in Washington have huge repercussions for companies — the auto industry, the steel industry, the high-tech industry — and they can’t be muted. They can’t be shut up. And I don’t think it’s fair or right or constitutional to tell any player in the system, You can’t make your views known. But the ways they make their preferences and feelings known can be cleaned up and made more transparent.

Any suggestions?
 One of the most mischievous things you could do — which I think would be quite effective — would be to simply require any lobbyist for a corporation who has a contact with a government official to, before the close of business on the day that he has the contact, post a notice on some Internet bulletin board that says, you know, “I talked to John Jones today about the tariffs on sugar.” There would be no secret or confidential lobbying or contacts — period. That would be dramatic. And that’s not beyond the realm of practicality.

You write that since the 1960s, we’ve had a political atmosphere “friendly to big business.” Do you see that changing anytime soon, despite the campaign rhetoric?
We’ll see a change in the atmosphere toward big finance. Wall Street has a very black eye, and it’s going to take years to clear up. And I think there is going to be legislation on executive compensation on Wall Street, which may affect big business too. Or it may be just that stockholders have to ratify pay packages.

But I don’t know whether now there’s going to be an atmosphere that business itself perceives as hostile. Certainly the incredible regulatory relaxation of the last eight years will end. And agencies like OSHA — which has become nonfunctioning — will become much more aggressive. The famous repetitive-stress-injury executive order that was about to go into effect when the Bush administration came into power, and was killed — that’ll be back. To me, enlightened businessmen should welcome things of this kind and not try to pretend that nothing’s changed.

Can a major corporation, or industry, survive without a real presence in Washington?
The interesting thing is that almost nobody tries. Microsoft tried for the first years of its existence, right up until the 1998 antitrust suit. They had nobody here . . . and now they have a huge office. That was their take on the experience of the antitrust suit — that they had to be in Washington in a big way. Certainly the overwhelming majority of Fortune 500 companies have offices here. And thirty-five years ago, almost none did.

How will they adjust to a government controlled by Democrats?
 There will be a massive turnover, I expect, in the personnel in Washington offices. In the DeLay era, most big companies made a point of hiring Republicans who were approved by Tom DeLay in the House and Rick Santorum in the Senate. Now, the new lobbying restrictions passed last year make that illegal — it’s a felony for a member of Congress to pressure a company to hire a particular person. But as a practical matter, big corporations are going to realize that Washington is going to be Democratic for a long time, and to have all these Republicans on their payroll doesn’t make any sense.

Republicans often charge that Democrats are “antibusiness.” But it doesn’t seem as though corporate interests have trouble finding Democratic officeholders to carry their water.
Right — remember the story of Tony Coelho in the late 1980s. And Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which was so successful this election cycle — he raised tens of millions of dollars, and most of that was from the business world and Wall Street. So they’ve got plenty of friends and plenty of levers — which could also be a problem for Obama, because there are significant members of his party who have become dependent on business money.

I find it interesting that you directly link the influence of money in politics and the declining effectiveness of Congress, and that you characterize the government itself as “broken” — basically because of this system of lobbying and finance.
I’m glad you caught that!

Are lobbyists to blame? And does that mean it’s ultimately the fault of the corporate interests that hired them?
 I think not. What we have is a system that was created by normal people responding in an understandable and predictable way to incentives dangled before them. Once it became clear to special interests of all kinds that every candidate for federal office was going to need a lot of money, it didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out: Maybe if we give them money, we’ll get better treatment! This arrangement of mutual dependency between Capitol Hill and corporate America is entirely a product of the skyrocketing cost of U.S. elections.

But the tragedy is that now that the new system is entrenched, there’s a serious disincentive to the very best Americans to get into the political game in the first place.