The Lobbying game

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan, 1994 by Milford Prewitt

One of the simplest lessons in the Art of Compromise 101 is that 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.

Notions of victory and defeat dissolve into irrelevance in a give-and-take area like Washington, where no one gets 100 percent of what they want, and yet no one leaves empty-handed either.

Nobody knows those lessons better than do the lobbyists of the National Restaurant Association. In fact, those lessons offer a clue to how NRA lobbyists measure their effectiveness.

In a world much more comfortable with clear-cut categories of winners and losers, NRA's lobbyists battle in a middle ground, where they see themselves not as the victors or the vanquished but as ever-vigilant defenders of an industry's way of life.

Though they can be stung by set-backs like the reduction on tax deductibility on business meals, they can come away energized with a split decision in the gains made in the FICA tip-tax credit.

Steeled in a constant state of rediness, the lobbyists hold the line against what they see as the peril of federal, state and local politicians, who are increasingly proposed new hazards that pose a threat to the restaurant industry.

It's a mission that has become, in the view of Mark Gorman, senior director for government affairs of the NRA, the association's No. 1 priority.

Gorman said that in some halcyon period int he past the NRA might have existed purely as a trade association content with the prime directive of sharing business information among its membership.

But that quaint mission of yester-year is over.

"The NRA is going through a transition," Gorman said. "We are no longer a business organization. If we are going to be successful and do the best job for our members, we are going to have to accept a new role of high-profile hardball and play politics."

Gorman stressed that the transformation in the association's character may rile some members, but he said the majority of the membership is pwshing for the change.

"We are still very much concerned with helping our members be very good business people," he said. "But I'm getting from the board an insistence that we move more and more in the direction of government relations and that we do whatever it takes to be successful, simply because it has been more and more difficult to be successful.

"I know this transformation is going to cause some dissension and will cause the organization to take on a different identity, but I think for the most part, the members are behing it."

Gorman oversees a $3 million annual budget and supervises a staff of 18 -- including three Capitol Hill lobbyists and a coordinator for state affairs -- in defending the NRA's interests. Also under his bailiwick is the coordination of the NRA's Political Action Committee, a 17-year-old adjunct that focuses on getting legislators elected to office who are sensitive to concerns of the industry.

Head of the NRA's lobbyijg efforts since 1987, Gorman worked for eight years as a legislative assistant to two senatorial staffs, Bob Packwood's of Oregon and John Chafee's of Rhode Island, where he built a reputation as a tax specialits.

He came to the NRA after spending four years with General Mills, hanfling the giant conglomerate's concern's affecting their foodservice group.

The General Mills experience proved to be a valuable bridge to the NRA.

"I guess you could say my career has had a kind of logical progression," he noted.

If Gorman had to pick a pivotal moment in history when the NRA was forced to begin changing its stripes from a passive business information group to an aggressive political one, the time would have been the day President Carter called for an end to "the three-martini lunch" in outlining his tax reform proposals.

From that period forward, the NRA fumes, it has been open season on the restaurant industry, and no game warden has seen fit to call and end to the hunt.

Every president since Carter, the association contends, regardless of their party, has seen the restaurant industry as a plump, ripened fruit going unharvested on the vine, capable of helping to satiate a voracious appetite for new taxes.

"It is troubling that the pressure against us is coming from both Democrat and Republician," Gorman complained. "The major problem we face is that people in this country just don't understand the role the restaurant industry plays in this economy, and it boils down to the fact that we basically have an industry image problem.

"They don't see it as an entry level job for millions of people or that it is a terrific vareer path for those who stay in it. They just tend to see busy restaurants at lunch or on the weekends but never the slow times."

The lobbyists complain that the general lack of business knowledge among the members of Congress contributes mightily to the industry's legislative pressures.

"The bad thing about Congress is that most of them don't know what it takes to run a business," said Elaine Graham, an NRA lobbyist who concentrates on legislation relating to health care, civil rights and employee benefits.