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BusinessWeek: January 18, 1993 |
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Books
WHY LOBBYISTS NEVER FAIL--TO LINE UP MORE WORK THE LOBBYISTS: HOW INFLUENCE PEDDLERS GET THEIR WAY IN WASHINGTON By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Times Books -- 334pp -- $25 MONEY TALKS: CORPORATE PACS AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE By Don Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Denise Scott Basic Books -- 272pp -- $25 Washington is a city of persistent myths. One of the most popular is the legend of the all-powerful lobbyist. Armed with charm, connections, and pots full of campaign contributions, he or she always delivers what the client wants, public be damned. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum effectively punctures this fantasy in The Lobbyists: How Influence Peddlers Get Their Way in Washington. Unfortunately, as the subtitle makes clear, that's not what he set out to do. The result is a useful book filled with the fine anecdotes and details one has come to expect from the author, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, but a work at war with its own thesis. The setting for The Lobbyists is the tax-and-spending debate of 1990, a tumultuous year on Capitol Hill that ended with the catastrophic agreement--for George Bush, at least--to raise taxes. Birnbaum tracks the efforts of four business lobbyist groups: the Capital Gains Coalition, dedicated to cutting tax rates on profits from the sale of assets; Coretech, a consortium backing incentives for research and development spending; the warring camps of mutual and stock life insurers; and the disingenuously named Coalition Against Regressive Taxation, an assortment of alcohol, tobacco, and transportation interests opposed to higher excise taxes. The problem with focusing on these groups is clear to anyone who followed the '90 debate and subsequent events: The capital-gains cut died in partisan acrimony. Excise taxes soared. Both halves of the life-insurance industry got a huge tax increase. And R&D incentives, after a string of temporary reprieves, expired and await resurrection in the Clinton Administration. The damage actually done by corporate lobbying of Congress is the opposite of what this book's title suggests. The nature of democratic politics makes it far easier to prevent action than to make something happen. Worse, Hill budget rules designed to check the deficit require that any benefit won by one interest be offset directly by someone else's loss. So business interests end up devoting much of their time to blocking one another's efforts. Corporate lobbyists thus have become major contributors to the much-decried Washington gridlock.Consider the struggles over capital-gains tax cuts and R&D tax credits. The forces that support these two notions would appear to be natural buddies. After all, the ostensible purpose of both tax breaks is to spur investment. But appearances are deceiving. The R&D credit is the darling of major corporations and of universities, which benefit indirectly through tax-subsidized corporate research grants. High-tech startups, though intensely focused on research, have little interest in the credit because they have no taxable profits. Such startups want their tax goodies in the form of a capital-gains break to lessen the bite on their entrepreneurial owners when they go public or sell out. Other major supporters of capital gains include real estate, art, and timber interests, who don't care about research. The shortage of money available for tax breaks made potential allies into mortal enemies. Coretech and the Capital Gains Coalition ended up frustrating each other. Not that failure is necessarily a problem for lobbyists, especially the free-lancers on whom this book concentrates. An outright win leaves a hired advocate exposed to the March of Dimes syndrome: What do you do after your disease is cured? Partial victory--or a narrow escape from defeat--allows a lobbyist both to tell the client how much worse it might have been and to line up work for the next round. Birnbaum accurately describes this phenomenon, and along the way provides detailed looks at such leading lobbyists as Mark Bloomfield, Wayne Thevenot, and Stuart Eizenstat, and examines their techniques. But Birnbaum never quite points out the dark Washington secret: Lobbyists often win by losing. Money Talks, a related volume by three academic sociologists, is flawed by a willingness to sacrifice reality to theory. The authors, Don Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Denise Scott, had the commendable notion of spending many hours talking to the managers of corporate political action committees to find out just what they think they are accomplishing. And the extensive quotations, most of them anonymous, make up by far the most valuable part of this book. A tip-off to its problems is found in glowing jacket blurbs from Jesse Jackson and Senator Paul D. Wellstone (D-Minn.). The authors are in thrall to the leftist antibusiness cant so popular on campuses. The silliness of their position peaks with the argument that the "hegemonic" power exercised by corporations over the political process "is similar to white treatment of blacks in the South in 1959." The amount of money thrown around by corporations and interest groups is indeed a major corrupting force in politics. But the analysis in Money Talks, rooted as it is in the premise that ownership of capital is the root of all political evil, is not about to help solve the problem. | |
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