The game of Wack-a-Lobbyist was a regular feature of the 2008 presidential campaign, with both then-candidate-now-President Obama and Senator McCain making it clear to everyone that they believed lobbyists were part of the problem in Washington DC. Both vowed they would drive lobbyists from the temple of democracy, and I’m pretty sure McCain pledged to drive a stake through the heart of any lobbyist he saw and sprinkle the dusted remains with holy water.
Now, President Obama is finding it somewhat difficult to fill the thousands of positions his administration now has open without tapping the talent and experience of the much-maligned lobbyist community. The Huffington Post reports:
Obama’s Anti-Lobbyist Policy Causing Unintended Harm
Barack Obama made no secret of his feelings for "Washington lobbyists" during the campaign and vowed that they wouldn’t be staffing his White House.
The implementation of that rule, however, has led to a number of consequences that Obama could never have intended. Eliminating lobbyists from consideration drains the pool of progressive talent that the White House needs at a time when agencies and departments are severely understaffed. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for instance, barely has any deputies as the economy continues to spiral out of control.
Lobbyists who for years have fought for workers’ rights, environmental protection, human rights, pay-equity for women, consumer protection and other items on the Obama agenda have found the doors to the White House HR department slammed shut. In the past, several progressive lobbyists explained, there was no reason not to register if there was a slim chance that the law might require it. Obama’s new policy changes the calculus, leading folks to deregister as federal lobbyists or consider other employment while they wait out the policy’s required two-year separation from lobbying.
"There is now a cottage industry of deregistration. Everyone who can deregister is deregistering," said one public-interest advocate…
The lobbyist registry was created to make the practice more transparent. The rise of deregistrations undermines that purpose…
One progressive lobbyist said that a coworker was given an opportunity to move from state-level to federal-level work – something she’d wanted for years – but is now reluctant for fear of getting the scarlet L around her neck.
Several lobbyists said that when the new policy was announced, affecting anyone who’d been a registered lobbyist in the last two years, a horde of their coworkers deregistered…
Several other advocates expressed frustration at the same phenomenon – that the anti-lobbyist policy rewards folks who simply didn’t…
…the rule ends up encouraging folks to lobby for corporate America. A corporate lobbyist often only lobbies Congress – and so wouldn’t be banned from working for federal agencies – and often lobbies on very narrow pieces of legislation. Public interest advocates, by contrast, lobby much more broadly.
…said one progressive lobbyist… "Anyone who wants to work for this organization will have to consider whether they’re willing to preclude the possibility of government service in the future. The same is true for civil rights groups, for environmental groups, for a whole range of civic groups that do work the Obama administration admires."
Members of the advocacy community, beyond the systemic risk, simply see the rule as unfair. One noted that Obama himself writes in his first memoir about public-interest lobbying that he did as a younger activist. "Would Martin Luther King be allowed to work in this administration?" one asked, noting that King lobbied extensively in 1963 and 1964 for the Civil Rights Act.
"Finally, we can turn the country around and help and that’s not an option because we’re evil lobbyists," said one labor lobbyist with more than 20 years experience…
Fundamentally, lobbying on behalf of the public interest is a good thing, advocates argue, but they also press the case that their specific skills should be in demand by the administration. The case they make: A) progressive lobbyists are not in the business to get rich B) their agenda is exactly the same as the administration’s agenda and C) they’ve been on the frontlines of battles over esoteric issues and have the most recent and detailed understanding of how to move the progressive agenda forward…
At root is a sense of betrayal. "I know a lot of people who are similarly situated who had worked very hard for the campaign on their own personal time — took off, spent their own money and were very, very supportive," said one White House applicant who lobbies for improved healthcare for low-income women. "It seems very unsophisticated to me to have gone down this road where you make no distinction between the environmental lobbyist and the Exxon lobbyist."
We’ve noted before the absurdity of attacking lobbyists for the ‘crime’ of representing American citizens’ interests to the government, and are happy to see our friends at the Huffington Post (some of them, at least) recognize the problem of overheated anti-lobbyist rhetoric being applied to actual governance.
With any luck, the President will simply recognize the campaign against lobbyists really represents a campaign against talent and experience in his administration (not to mention a campaign against the First Amendment), and scotch the whole silly notion that lobbyists must be kept from his staff.
