IN THE MIDST of the encryption campaign, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, leading to the Ken Starr investigation. In retrospect, it’s difficult to believe how obsessed the media (and, later, Republicans in Congress) became in 1998 with the possible impeachment of President Clinton. One measure is that Jack, as a former White House Counsel, appeared on a major Sunday news program—Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week—to defend President Clinton ten Sundays in a row. For one year, Washington debated whether the Lewinsky scandal and the president’s statements were a threat to the rule of law.
Jack got so many TV invitations he couldn’t begin to handle them all. This was a good thing for our business; as impeachment began to unfold, other Democratic lobbyists started to scramble for TV invitations to defend Clinton. One day, a producer for CNN’s Crossfire—hosted at that time by Pat Buchanan from the right and Bill Press from the left—called, asking if Jack could appear that night. Jack had a conflict, so he and I talked, and he suggested that I do the show. After all, I too had served in the White House counsel’s office and had been following the Starr investigation as closely as Jack, helping him to prepare for his TV appearances. I called the CNN producer, told him Jack had a conflict, and asked: how about me? I told him my background, he asked me a few questions about what I thought, I gave him my views, and he said, “Okay, let me check, and I’ll call you back.” Thirty minutes later, I was invited to the CNN studio.
I was extremely nervous as I sat in the makeup chair, waiting to be led to the set. Pat Buchanan dropped by, said hello, and was very friendly. I can barely remember the actual show, it went by in a blur. Later, a friend who watched said I was like a matador with a red cape that had “Clinton” written across it, and Buchanan was a bull, chasing me around a bullring. One of my clients, a Republican, told me he and his wife were watching. Surprised to see an unknown defending Clinton and critiquing Starr, and before her husband could tell her who I was, she turned to him and said, “Who’s that son of a bitch?”
After the show, the e-mails poured in, not just from friends in DC, but from Alabama and even from random college friends across the country. It really hadn’t mattered what I had said, people had seen me on Crossfire, defending the president of the United States. As one of my oldest cousins in Mobile, a Republican, said to my parents: “If you go up against Pat Buchanan and acquit yourself well, you’re playing with the big boys.”
Regardless of how I performed, I was off to the TV races. All the shows were calling for Jack, and, when he didn’t have time or want to do them, I pitched myself. “Have you ever done TV before?” the young assistant producers would ask. “I was just on Crossfire last week,” I’d say. “You’re booked.” Next was Geraldo Live!, CNN’s Burden of Proof, and several other now-defunct cable news shows. I was a B-list talking head.
Jack was scheduled to be on Meet the Press (or simply “Meet,” as it is known by the Washington cognoscenti) the next day. One of the producers called me: “Jack is in New York today because his mother had a heart attack.” I had no idea. Jack had not called me. “He suggested that you fill in for him tomorrow on the show.” I was immediately seized with panic. CNN and MSNBC cable shows are one thing, but appearing on a major Sunday show was in a completely different league. I only had a minute to decide before she would simply hang up and find someone else, more than eager to appear. I said okay, thinking to myself this might be the only time in my life I ever get a chance to be on Meet the Press.
The producer told me she’d send a car to pick me up at home at 7:00 a.m. the next day, as the show tapes at 8:00 a.m. I’d be on with several others, primarily the lawyer for the Secret Service agents Starr had just subpoenaed to get their testimony about what they’d seen and heard while protecting President Clinton, an unprecedented and potentially very disruptive move by a prosecutor. Other participants in a roundtable discussion would be Stuart Taylor, then with Legal Times; Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who had been on TV repeatedly urging a hardline approach to the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, who would appear remote from a California studio.
That Saturday night, I had heart-pounding anxiety like I had never felt before. In fact, I was terrified and deeply regretted my decision to do the show. Jack called me from his mother’s bedside (she was doing fairly well) and did his best to calm me down. “Just think up and memorize four short speeches making four different points you want to make. Then, whatever Tim Russert asks you, find a way quickly to pivot into one of those brief speeches. And try to make all four during the show and not get shut out by the other guests talking over you.” We talked about what the four points might be.
I thought that was great advice, so I stayed up late into the night writing out my little speeches and practicing them over and over again (out loud) until I could deliver them smoothly. I remembered from moot court during law school that even when I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to say, until I’d practiced saying it out loud many times, I’d search and stumble for words. On the other hand, I didn’t want to sound too canned and rehearsed. I was determined not to pivot awkwardly if the question didn’t fit with one of my prepared answers.
The car arrived the next morning with a little NBC sign in the window. I was disappointed that none of my neighbors were awake and outside to see me get into the car. Once at the studio, I waited with the other guests in the green room. William Safire and Doris Kearns Goodwin were having a little fruit together. After I introduced myself, Safire said, “Have some fruit, Meet the Press always has great fruit.” For a second I thought about saying, “Face the Nation wouldn’t sell you a pastry,” but there was no faking it with Safire and Goodwin: they knew I was a rookie.
A staffer led me onto the set and sat me next to Tim Russert, who was friendly, and, in the few minutes before we went on air, chatted amiably with me and the other guests. Turley was on my right, Stuart Taylor next to him, and Michael Lieber, the lawyer for several Secret Service agents, sat across the table. The show’s theme song began, and it wasn’t long before Russert soon turned to me: “You worked for the White House counsel’s office. What is the White House take on all this?” I was taken aback that Russert had introduced me as a White House mouthpiece, when I had spoken to no one at the White House in preparation for the show. I blurted out: “I haven’t worked for the White House in two years.”
Then I went on the attack, accusing Starr of being on a “fishing expedition” and of casting a “wide dragnet” inside the White House, searching for “corroborative circumstantial evidence of whether the president may have made a misleading statement in a deposition in a civil suit that was dismissed by the court more than two years ago.” That was a mouthful but came out without a hitch. Later in the show, I got in another whack, reminding people that Starr’s initial charge was to discover whether obstruction of justice had occurred in Whitewater or the Lewinsky matter, and “so far on both fronts he has drilled down and come up with only a dry hole.” Finally, I accused Starr of overstepping his bounds, doing the “dirty work” for Congress, when under the Independent Counsel statute, as soon as he found evidence that the president may have committed a crime, he was supposed to lateral the issue to the House of Representatives. “In this country, it is the democratic process that elects our presidents, and it is the democratic process—through our elected officials—who should decide whether the investigation of a president for misconduct should be pursued.” I predicted that the House of Representatives would not impeach Clinton for lying in a civil deposition about a sexual liaison (this proved to be an accurate forecast, as the impeachment grounds later voted by the Republican House were based on Clinton having lied to a grand jury, a foul that had not yet occurred during my appearance on Meet the Press). Russert turned to Panetta and asked him if he agreed with me. I prayed that Panetta wouldn’t say, “That man is an impostor, I worked in the White House, and I don’t recognize him from Adam.” Thankfully, Panetta didn’t say that, but instead concurred.
After the show, I was pleased. I had even fought back when Turley had tried to talk over me, saying that my analogy to lying about golf scores was dangerous because we shouldn’t let anyone lie about anything when under oath. Impeachment, I said, was a judgment call by elected officials, and no one sitting around a table at Meet the Press—not me, not Turley—can claim to know what is an impeachable offense. Only the House of Representatives can decide that question. I thought I was effective in telling Turley to stop pretending to be the moral arbiter of presidential wrongdoing.
Once I was back at my apartment, the show came on, where I could watch myself as it was broadcast across Washington. Soon phone calls and e-mails started coming in. The reviews were unanimously positive. Jack even called from his mother’s bedside and said I’d hit a home run. A couple of reporters I knew told me it was an A performance. If you’d asked me whether I wanted to do it again or was happy with the one in the can, I’d have taken the one in the can.
For the next week, everyone I saw in Washington had seen it and complimented me on it. It was quite an education in the power of the medium, as only a random few had caught me on Crossfire, but almost everyone had seen me on Meet the Press. The invitations from the cable shows went exponential. I was getting my fifteen minutes of fame, as they all wanted me on to explain the White House position. During the next two weeks, I did six or seven shows. My clients started treating me like a rock star. My higher profile was enhancing my value to the private sector. I even got a little cocky and spoke to a Wall Street Journal reporter on the record, saying “[the] White House had no vision” when it came to encryption policy. Word got back to me from the White House that, if I hadn’t just done such a good job on Meet the Press, they would’ve scalped me for having the brass to criticize the White House in print.
Ed had seen all this and been impressed by the role Jack and I were playing. Even I was making a name for myself. The encryption clients had been impressed as well. Jack’s stature and mine were on the rise in the Democratic Party because of impeachment. It was a classic example of how to raise your value in Washington by helping to circle the wagons around Democrats in trouble and shoot to kill at any Republican raiders. Even Republicans respected us for it. As Ed used to say, sometimes in football you look across the line and think, I’d like those guys on my team.
Jack, Ed, and I worked together so well that Ed thought we should combine forces and start our own firm as a group of communications specialists with bipartisan capability to lobby both Congress and the administration. I liked the idea. Arnold & Porter was paying me as a fourth-year associate, and by this point I was thirty-eight years old. I was ready to bolt. Jack, on the other hand, had been at Arnold & Porter for more than twenty years, interrupted only by his White House service. One of the firm’s highest paid partners, he was risk averse and said no to the idea. But Ed and I wouldn’t give up. We met at a hamburger joint near Arnold & Porter and made a PowerPoint presentation for Jack, which would show him how the new firm would work and how within a year or two he could be making even more money than we guessed he was banking at Arnold & Porter. We made our pitch to Jack with great passion and enthusiasm, and still he said no.
Finally, after months had passed, Jack walked into my office one day and said, “We’re leaving the firm.” It had finally dawned on Jack that teaming up with a high-profile Republican was the best way to take electoral risk out of our money-making equation. Arnold & Porter had always been a Democratic firm and had some difficulty attracting Republican lawyers. It was the fall of 1999, and 2000 would be the year of a presidential campaign that would put either Al Gore or a Republican in the White House. Ed, a prominent Republican, was urging us to form a partnership. As Democrats, we wanted to be diversified against the risk of a Gore loss.
We made our move, and Quinn Gillespie & Associates (I always joked that I was the ampersand) opened its doors in January 2000. Jack and Ed had decided to split the stake marginally in Jack’s favor, and Jack had generously cut me in for a lucrative, though small, percentage. (Later, after George Bush was elected president, Jack immediately offered to equalize shares with Ed.) QGA wasn’t the first bipartisan firm in Washington, but we were the first to put communications strategy (messaging and public relations) at the heart of the firm. This was supplemented by a bipartisan lobbying capability that encompassed the administration and both houses of Congress, particularly at the leadership level.
Because the Clinton administration had recently reversed its encryption policy, we started with the momentum of success. All of Jack’s and my clients at Arnold & Porter followed us to the new firm, as did Ed’s, so we began with a slate of blue-chip clients. We had a strong team that brought together people with superior political acumen, experience, and intel. Jack and Ed were consummate Washington insiders, and their approaches to strategy complemented each other. We had people who had worked at public relations firms. And we had others who were experienced lobbyists with numerous connections on both sides of the Hill (Senate and House) and both sides of the aisles (Democrats and Republicans).
BlackBerrys had just come out, and Jack bought one for everyone at the firm. We stayed in constant contact with one another, immediately sending by e-mail any political intel we had gathered. This gave the whole firm a real-time overview of happenings that might affect our clients. Ed and Jack, who both knew dozens of reporters, would feed them tidbits of intelligence and try to plant or shape stories that would help our clients. At the end of each day, we’d reconvene at QGA and sort through it all, fine-tuning strategies for our client and designing an action plan for the next day.
Jack and I had become very good friends, and I thoroughly enjoyed coming to work with him every day. We were becoming genuinely closer to Ed and our Republican colleagues, as well. Although we were all active for our respective political parties, once we stepped off the elevators at QGA, it was about delivering for our clients so we could all make a lot of money. We joked that we were all members of the Green Party. Ed was a rising star in the Republican firmament. In 2000, he was picked to be the program director for the Republican Convention. Next he spent the fall working directly with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes on the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign. Jack, who’d been asked to work full-time on the Gore campaign, stayed at QGA to hold down the fort. We tried to be useful to Gore with discrete projects and, in Jack’s case, as a campaign surrogate on TV.
I noticed a subtle change in my political outlook. Although I wanted Gore to win and even travelled to Wausau, Wisconsin, for the final two weeks of the campaign, I could tell the firm would be well positioned for at least the next four years whether Gore or Bush won. Our motto was “We don’t lose sleep on election night.” Clients started to pour through the doors.
On election night, Jack was in Nashville with the Gore team, Ed in Austin with the Bush team. As the Florida results flip-flopped and Gore called Bush to retract his earlier concession, Jack and Ed were sending e-mails to each other: “How does it look to you?” Ed played a key role for Bush in Florida during the recount. Jack did TV for Gore, but he and I both chose to stay away from Tallahassee and the Gore legal team, which was already awash in attorneys. After the Supreme Court’s controversial decision gave the election to Bush, it was clear that Ed was going to be a hot commodity. A Bush administration wasn’t my preference for the country, but it was great for our firm. We had buzz. We had cachet. And then, suddenly, we had trouble. In his final days in office, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, an indicted oil trader who was one of Jack’s clients.
In 1983, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Rudy Giuliani charged Rich with tax evasion under the Racketeer Influenced Corruption Organizations Act (RICO), which is normally used against organized crime. Rather than face the charges, Rich, a billionaire, fled to Switzerland and was thus a fugitive from the U.S. justice system. Rich’s legal team, led by Republican Scooter Libby, had for years tried to negotiate with the SDNY for Rich’s return to face charges. But the SDNY refused to talk until Rich surrendered himself. In 1999, Rich’s legal team hired Jack, who only agreed to help after learning that former Republican Attorney General Bill Barr supported the merits of Rich’s case. Jack tried to convince then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to play an active role in the negotiations between the SDNY and Rich. Only later did Rich’s legal team decide to try for a presidential pardon.
In early January 2001, I ran into Paul Carey, an SEC commissioner (tragically, he died of cancer just five months later). Apropos of nothing, Paul said: “I hate your new client.” I asked which one. “Marc Rich,” he replied with distaste. Rich actually wasn’t a QGA client. Jack was representing Rich in his capacity as an attorney, and no one at QGA had specific knowledge of Jack’s actions on Rich’s behalf. But Paul’s ire made me realize that the pardon application was receiving high-level attention and that things were heating up. One source of controversy was that Rich, an oil trader, had allegedly done business with Iran, which was then (and is now) proscribed by U.S. law. For many, this alone was enough to disqualify Rich for a pardon (even though the charges had been dropped, presumably because Rich was operating out of Switzerland).
On his final day in office, Clinton granted 140 pardons and several commutations. The list included two convicted felons (who had paid Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s brother, $200,000 to help them seek clemency), Susan McDougal (of the Whitewater real-estate scandal), and the President’s brother, Roger Clinton (who had been convicted in 1985 of a cocaine-related offense and served a one-year prison sentence). Yet it was the pardons of Marc Rich and his partner Pinky Green that elicited the loudest outcry. Media talking heads declared themselves appalled, former President Jimmy Carter called it “disgraceful,” and the Republicans smelled an opportunity to tarnish Clinton’s legacy.
Even though Scooter Libby (whom Cheney had just named as his chief of staff) and other prominent Republican lawyers had also worked for Rich, it was Jack who became the focal point of public and media outrage. Because Jack was a good friend and because the media storm was bad for QGA, I threw myself into the crisis-management effort. Jack needed to get a defense of the Rich pardon into the media. So I helped him write an op-ed for the Washington Post, which ran on January 26, 2001, within a week of the pardon. In it, we argued that Giuliani’s indictment of Rich was overzealous. It marked the first time that RICO—which Congress had intended for use against the mob and which carries long prison sentences—had ever been used to charge an individual with tax fraud. The oil companies themselves, also accused of hiding profits to evade taxes, had only been fined under civil law. Only Rich had been targeted for criminal prosecution (under a statute that the Justice Department later deemed inappropriate for a tax-fraud case). When the Department of Energy reviewed the Marc Rich transactions, it concluded that his companies had properly accounted for them. Professor Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law School, a leading tax-law expert and the husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (he died in 2010), had also been retained by Rich and said that Rich’s tax treatment of the oil profits was lawful.
The op-ed was a straw in a gale. No one was interested in the possible merits of Rich’s case or the pardon. Jack was being vilified on TV. His reputation suffered, and old friends avoided him. The media barrage was relentless. One day we came back to the office to find voicemail messages from a dozen journalists and TV anchors, including Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, and Morley Safer. And when it came out that Denise Rich, the ex-wife of Marc Rich, had made a $400,000 contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library the previous May, many concluded the pardon had been a quid pro quo.
I became the only person in America willing to go on TV and defend the Marc Rich pardon. I was careful to say that I hadn’t been involved and that Jack had represented Rich in his capacity as an attorney, not as a QGA principal. But I believed it was important for people to understand that Jack hadn’t circumvented the Justice Department, that the Justice Department itself had subsequently deemed RICO’s use in tax cases to be inappropriate, and that the Department of Energy had reviewed Rich’s transaction and ruled it lawful. Although others might contend that Rich’s fugitive status disbarred him from a presidential pardon, I believed the facts of the case provided a basis for one and that the presidential pardon power was unlimited. (Privately, I thought it had been a mistake for Jack to seek a pardon for a fugitive, and an even bigger mistake—for obvious political reasons—for Clinton to grant it.)
It was useless. The Republicans wanted blood. Congressional investigators compelled QGA to turn over documents, including e-mails I’d written to Jack and others at the firm after the pardon had been announced. In total, Jack spent nineteen hours testifying before the House Government Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I sat behind him as part of his counsel. Scooter Libby, who’d represented Rich for a decade and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees from the case, was also called to testify (the Republican-led House committee scheduled Libby’s testimony for late in the evening, after the TV cameras had left). Libby turned on his former client. Asked whether he believed that Rich was a traitor to the United States, Libby replied, “Yes, I do.”
I began to notice that people would react differently based on my own posture about Jack. If someone asked me, “How’s Jack doing?” and I responded with “There’s a principle here, that every client deserves a lawyer, and Jack was just being a lawyer,” then I inevitably would have to suffer through a lecture on how egregious Marc Rich’s actions were and that Jack should’ve known better. If, on the other hand, I responded with, “Oh, this is so terrible, Jack is being destroyed by this,” then I would get a different response: “Hey, he was just being a lawyer, he’ll come through okay.”
If the Republications wanted blood, so did the media. Commentators and columnists (this was before the blogger era) were nearly unanimous in their outrage at, and condemnation of, the Rich pardon. Washington, it seemed, wanted a sacrificial lamb (and, ideally, the shepherd himself: Bill Clinton). The relentless inquisition was conducted in another forum as well. For a year after the pardon, SDNY prosecutors repeatedly required Jack, President Clinton, and others to testify before a specially convened grand jury. Some of them were the same prosecutors who’d been involved in the Rich case. But this made them “parties” to the pardon and essentially conflicted in the matter, I believed. If anyone was going to investigate whether Clinton had been bribed to grant the pardon (an assertion that was dubious on its face), it should’ve been other prosecutors in another district (though if we’d said this publicly, it might simply have goaded the SDNY to continue harassing Jack).
I’ll never forget Jack’s strength and grace as he endured, and cooperated fully with, these investigations. His experience was often on my mind when, years later, Ted and I were prodding the Justice Department to investigate financial fraud. I frequently pointed out that the Justice Department had been more relentless with Jack (whose role in the Rich pardon had harmed precisely no one) than it had been with Wall Street executives (whose malfeasance had caused a financial and economic crisis that had harmed millions of people). The same goes for those House Republicans who impeached President Clinton, and who (beyond passing FERA) have remained quiet about prosecuting Wall Street fraud.
Part of me—despite my respect for Jack and Ed, their effectiveness, and integrity—was never fully comfortable that I’d become a lobbyist. It’s true that on a personal level lobbying was often exciting, interesting, and challenging. I got to advise top decision makers (CEOs, general counsels, and high-ranking government officials) far earlier in my career than I would have at Covington & Burling. In the spring of 2000, for example, I negotiated with Federal Trade Commission staff and eventually the FTC chairman himself to design self-regulatory principles for a coalition of major online advertisers. A month later, I presented and defended the principles to a panel of seven state attorneys general, including those of New York and California. In short, lobbying, from the beginning, could be pretty heady stuff. But it could also be pretty stressful and distasteful stuff. It was hard to wait for a return phone call from the government official I was being paid to deliver access to or obtain intelligence from (the whole lobbying enterprise hinges on being called back). And it was stressful (and at times distasteful) to raise money for elected officials. Not surprisingly, fundraising and return phone calls are interrelated. More of the former elicits more of the latter.
In 1997, when Jack and I first started at Arnold & Porter, we did little fundraising. Jack’s ties to Clinton and Gore gave him plenty of access without it. As the years went by, we began to do more. And as you organize more fundraising events, your name creeps up the publicly available list of large Democratic contributors, and you become a target for fundraising consultants who’ve noted your success and want you to do fundraisers for their senators and members.
With Washington awash in money, it’s tempting to conclude that the whole system is rigged. In reality, the situation is more complex. In lobbying, for example, raising money is simply part of the job. Senators and members of Congress continuously call the heads (and the lieutenants) of almost every lobbying firm in DC to ask them to do fundraising events. It’s difficult to say no. But if you don’t learn how to fend off some of the requests, you’ll have little time for anything else. If it’s an unimportant member of Congress, you simply dodge the call. If it’s a senator whose relationship you don’t strongly value, you return the call and say, “I’ll help with another one of your events and do the best I can.” If it’s a member or senator whose relationship you do value, it’s only a matter of how much you’ll commit to fundraise for the event and when it can be scheduled.
Some lobbyists are fanatical about fundraising. They host as many as two or three events each week. Because a limit exists on how much each person or political action committee can contribute in an election cycle, it’s sometimes a mystery to me how they find so much money. I suspect some of these bundlers pay their firm employees at levels where the employees are expected to contribute to the firm’s events. Linking those two elements would be a federal crime, but there’s little doubt that much of a typical lobbyist’s income (derived from corporate clients) goes right back into the fundraising coffers of the senators and members they most frequently lobby.
I’ve always thought a good career strategy for any lobbyist would be to select four or five key senators—on the most important committees, from states where reelection isn’t assured—and become deeply involved in their fundraising and political activities. If you can raise money from some group of pockets or simply facilitate the senator’s campaign aides in meeting the right people who can help raise money, you’re valuable. But you can’t be a one-and-done fundraiser. Your commitment and involvement need to be sustained—and perceived as such.
If you can put that amount of effort into five senators, you’ll become their Washington friend. And that means you’ll always have access. If they begin to trust you, they’ll listen intently when you come to them with a request. Your reputation for being part of their trusted circle of political advisors will grow. As a result, more and more special interests will hire you to help them ask for senatorial favors.
If a company hires enough lobbyists with these kinds of personal relationships established across the Senate and House, on both sides of the aisle, then that company will always have access where it counts and to elected officials eager to be helpful. I’ve sat around tables and been on conference calls where I was only one of ten or twenty or even thirty lobbyists retained by a company. The roll call alone can take five minutes (thankfully, with a last name at the front of the alphabet, I could stop paying attention after the first minute).
The result of all this strategically maximized lobbying and fundraising effort is that those corporate and Wall Street interests (and their lobbyists) that are most affected by congressional and regulatory decisions are best poised at each lever and pressure point to pursue their interests, whether this is to defend a favorable status quo or to tweak legislation and regulatory rules in their favor. Lobbying is only a subset of a much broader problem: the ability of special interests—due to their ability to raise money for elected officials and to retain lobbyists and former regulators to represent them—to have much greater, more frequent, and more influential access in Washington than ordinary Americans have.
And it’s not just about lobbying Congress. Much of what we did was called “conditioning the environment” to influence regulatory decisions. Decades ago, after the parties had made a given case in writing and in person, regulators in Washington would apply the law, behind closed doors, on the merits of that case. Today, the law and the merits are often less important than the power and allies a special interest can marshal in favor of its position. In the end, regulators still make a merit-based decision, but only after giant armies have clashed on Washington’s darkling plain—encompassing Congress, the administration, and multitudes of constituent and interest groups—applying as much pressure as possible.
I’ve been a public servant and a lobbyist. From both of these perspectives, I’ve always believed that lobbyists play an important intermediary role. They provide advice and intelligence to their clients, and facts, analysis, and advocacy to government officials. While a public servant, I believed governance should be open—in the sense of both transparent and available—to interested parties. I found it quite helpful to have people bringing me the best facts and arguments that supported a particular policy position. Ideally, all competing interests (those in favor of the legislation or policy and those against it) are equally adept and vigorous in their advocacy. You, the government official, listen to their briefings, read their materials, and then make your own well-informed judgments.
The problem arises when the advocacy is asymmetrical—that is, when Corporate America or Wall Street lines up on one side of an issue, and no one (or only a grossly outnumbered, outgunned, and out-organized few) lines up on the other. Only a few public-interest advocates are consistently effective. How could it be otherwise? Only the corporate teams—which are extremely well paid, specially trained, and refreshed with substitutions—never waver or become fatigued or despondent during the game. Imagine Appalachian State lining up against the New York Giants and you’ll get some idea of how, in Washington, at kick-off the public interest is a four-touchdown underdog.