For next Tuesday: Drutman, chl 1-3.
"Credibility first" and "Only the Facts Count" (Berry 135) GEORGIA T. ON LEBRON
Cigler ch. 11
- Small wins can equal big gains (212)
- The wins often take place in the bureaucracy
- Wins usually occur far upstream of public actions: bills that never see the light of day, provisions that go into the first draft of legislatin
PRE-PUBLIC PHASE
- Bill drafting
- Preliminary discussion of issues
PUBLIC PHASE
- Hearings
- News events
- Committee and floor action
- Presidential signing
POST-PUBLIC PHASE
- Regulations: APA
- Implementation
From a leading lobbyist:
- Lobbying is persuasive advocacy. … lobbying is attempting to convince 535 judges, based on their prior records, known beliefs, public comments and legislative histories that can be known by those who put in the effort.
- Lobbyists spend most of their days reading & researching. As with the law, effective advocacy requires preparation. Your meetings are with crazy-busy staffers who have maybe 15 minutes for you amidst receiving texts & emails. You need to be concise, compelling and clear
- Most lobbying meetings are with young(ish) staffers, to help them understand thins they don’t know (about technology or medicine or energy or countless other areas where staffers are getting up to speed). Their jobs are to research the issues to help educate their bosses.
- Lobbyists are specialists like so many others inside companies… just as businesses have specialists who handle HR, niche lawyers to deal with niche legal matters and investor relations, they need and have government relations. Government is an essential stakeholder, especially for regulated industries.
- The majority of lobbying fights are between big dogs… rather than screwing the little guy, patent reform is Big Tech vs Big PhRMA vs Big Universities. Tax reform was a clash of the titans.
- If you were re-designing Washington to be better and more effective, you would still create lobbyists… to stand between Members & staff who mean well but lack expertise, and businesses where most people are inventing, manufacturing or selling products.
- Lobbying entails more than face-to-face meetings with Members & staff. Effective advocacy campaigns are surround sound…. deploys its lobbyists to meet with staffers on the Hill, flys-in executives to meet with Members, invites local representatives to visit in-district factories, encourages its industry allies and trade associations to follow-up with similar visits, runs TV ads to influence what staff sees, runs radio ads to influence what they hear in the car, runs digital ads to influence what appears on their phones, hires academics and think tanks to influence what they hear from others and see on social media, works the press to influence what they read in the papers, organizes local advocates to shape what they hear from the grassroots, potentially invests in political activities to bring political pressure and salience to the issue, engage NGOs (that by one estimate spend $10B annually on policy), etc. etc.
- Of all of the individuals involved in the effort described above, ONLY lobbyists (who spend at least 20% of our time on meetings) disclose our clients and fees. All the other media advisers, grassroots specialists, digital strategists, legal analysts, hired-academics, etc. – at least 65% of the total spend according to Prof. Tim LaPira, are part of the influence industry but not (technically) lobbyists. It’s a swamp because the waters are opaque… we lobbyists are the turtles who swim atop the brackish waters
The lay of the land"
- Know the news -- much of lobbying is monitoring (Cigler 202)
- Know the jurisdictions: tax, appropriations, regulation
- Know the process
- Know the calendar
- Know the people
- Plant seeds
How to lobby
- Soft sells and building relationships
- Lobbying staff: what to do (see video above)
- Lobbying staff: what not to do
- Ethics
The Outside Game
Punctuated Equilibrium, News Media and Framing (Cigler, ch. 8)
Clearest example: ballot measures https://yeson22.com (h/t Eric)
Outside validators (or Carville's earthier phrase)
- Think tanks and their funding
- Heritage and Heritage Action for America
James Rufus Koren at the Los Angeles Times:
Paid protesters are a real thing.
Crowds on Demand, a Beverly Hills firm that’s an outspoken player in the business of hiring protesters, boasts on its website that it provides its clients with “protests, rallies, flash-mobs, paparazzi events and other inventive PR stunts.… We provide everything including the people, the materials and even the ideas.”
The company has hired actors to lobby the New Orleans City Council on behalf of a power plant operator, protest a Masons convention in San Francisco and act like supportive fans and paparazzi at an L.A. conference for life coaches.
But according to a lawsuit filed by a Czech investor, Crowds on Demand also takes on more sordid assignments. Zdenek Bakala claims the firm has been used to run an extortion campaign against him.
Bakala has accused Prague investment manager Pavol Krupa of hiring Crowds on Demand to pay protesters to march near his home in Hilton Head, S.C., and to call and send emails to the Aspen Institute and Dartmouth College, where Bakala serves on advisory boards, urging them to cut ties to him. Bakala alleges that Krupa has threatened to continue and expand the campaign unless Bakala pays him $23 million.
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