King of the Lobby

"I think this book is intriguing for several reasons. It’s a caricature of the old lobbyist, it talks about what it used to be like. It talks about a time when things were much more corrupt than they are now. I really do think there is a big difference. When I started my career, there was a famous movie mogul, who was a big Democrat, and he kept an unbelievable amount of cash in a New York office safe. That’s how it was then. Now it’s much more difficult to pass cash around. The book is interesting because lobbying has of course changed a lot, with Twitter and Tweeter and technology. That’s one aspect of it. But the other aspect of it, again going back to The Prince , going back to Alinsky, is a real understanding about human nature. And when I thought about it over the weekend and I looked at the book, I realized that there is a similarity between what Sam Ward did and what I do. My ‘evenings’ when I bring together the media, Members of Congress and business spokesmen. I don’t know if you’ve seen the articles or not but The Economist and The Wall Street Journal all talk about my dinners. I found out 20 years ago that members of Congress never get to discuss issues. They say: ‘When we’re at a hearing, we’re signing mail. When we’re at our office, we’re looking at the next appointment. Then we have to run over to Party headquarters to raise money for our reelection campaigns. So the only time we actually get to talk with our colleagues is when we’re on an airplane.’ And so I said, why don’t I do this? And I did. And it’s been going on every since and everyone’s come. He may have been. Was he part of a scheme to bribe a congressman to vote a certain way? Did he milk his clients? Well, perhaps that was a victimless crime. That’s much more important today than it was then. Because in Sam Ward’s time issues weren’t that complicated. Now any issue is much more complicated than one can imagine. In the old days you could actually understand what was being passed. One can talk about being a cynic, but there are many in the Washington establishment who mean well. So they work for the government and then what they do? They end up drafting the regulations, the thousands of regulations that are needed for, say, the health care bill or the Wall Street reform bill. But then they end up being the only ones who understand them. So then they go downtown and represent companies or those folks who are being regulated, because they’re the only ones who can understand it. What does a lobbyist need to do? No. 1 he obviously needs to have access to the policymaker, he needs to have credibility. Secondly, he obviously has to have a command of the substance. Then he also has to provide some judgment on how this all unfolds. Not only can the average member of Congress not know what is in the bill, he can’t know the broader picture of what is going on."