The Hollow Core: Interests in National Policy Making. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1993 by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making.

John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Robert L. Nelson, and Robert H. Salisbury.

Harvard University Press, $39.95

Just over two years ago, a large group of top government officials sequestered themselves in a converted bar at the Officers Club of Andrews Air Force Base. Theft purpose was to negotiate in complete secrecy the sensitive details of what would later become the 1990 deficit reduction act.

But one enterprising lobbyist was able to break their isolation. Frederick Graefe, a partner in the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, was a former marine who still had friends in the military. One of them was an officer at Andrews, who, at Graefe's request, told the guards at the main gate to allow Graefe onto the base whenever he wanted--ostensibly to play golf. What the lobbyist did instead was wait in the Officers Club parking lot for his friends on lawmakers' staffs to come out and brief him on the talks. Just in case he was caught, Graefe always kept his golf clubs with him.

As this story illustrates, lobbying knows no bounds in the nation's capital. It also operates almost completely without regulation. Indeed, professional lobbying is one of the last rogue industries in America. With revenues in the billions of dollars and participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands, lobbying is a big business getting bigger all the time. But thanks to official inauention, the four separate lobbying registration laws on the books are toothless and ineffective. Lobbyists like Graefe ply their trade free of serious scrutiny by either government or the public at large.

Now comes another book that tries to pull back the veil on lobbying. The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making, is a serious, academic examination of how lobbyists operate in Washington. It isn't the kind of book that anyone other than a graduate student in political science would ever want to cuddle up with in front of a fireplace. And its main message isn't very sexy: Lobbyists struggle to get their way in a highly uncertain and ever-changing policy environment. But, perhaps inadvertently, the book also helps shed some light on the important and, until recently, almost completely furtive business of influence peddling.

Buried in over 400 pages of thick analysis, The Hollow Core contains data compiled over several years that quantifies how pervasive and sophisticated modern-day lobbying has become. In effect, the book concludes that lobbyists these days are much different than their caricature. They aren't fat, cigar-smoking men who shove $100 bills into the pockets of compliant legislators. They are economists, advertising executives, telemarketing specialists, and even accountants.

One chart helps tell the tale. From a sample of 316 lobbying organizations, the authors detail precisely how often the groups prepare testimony and draft legislation and regulations. It also shows lobbyists doing more typical things, such as contacting congressional committees and executive branch agencies. "As you can see," the authors admit, "we are inclined to want to count things."

Many Americans should want to keep a better count of what lobbyists do as well, and The Hollow Core is in an odd way a lengthy argument for changing the nation's laws to help make that possible. The authors downplay the notion that lobbyists are decisive in policy battles. Hence the title. The authors see lobbyists more as circling around policy choices rather than being central to their development.

But a reader cannot help concluding that the line between those inside and those outside of government isn't clearly drawn. The circle that lobbyists form around this hollow core is extremely adaptive and useful to the people who make and implement the nation's laws. Even if they don't always win, lobbyists are obviously a permanent and influential force that has to be reckoned with in Washington.

This seemingly simple conclusion took the four top-flight academics who authored this book many years to document and convey. It shouldn't take that long. And President Clinton, for one, wants to foreshorten that process. He is pressing this year to enact the first truly thorough lobbying disclosure law so that others can learn quickly and with relative ease how lobbying works. And his sentiment--if not his specific proposal--contains a lot to be commended. Finding out the many things about lobbyists that now go undisclosed would enormously enhance our understanding of government. An effective lobbying law might have revealed, for example, that lobbyists representing such corporate giants as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, including former Carter administration adviser Stuart Eizenstat, sat together with senior congressional aides and essentially wrote the version of the tax credit for research-and-development expenditures that passed the House of Representatives in 1989. A tougher lobbying law might also have disclosed that a group of former congressional staffers-turned-professional-lobbyists have for years bankrolled an annual skiing trip to Vail, Colorado, to woo their successors on Capitol Hill.