Lame Ducks Wing It

This is not just the season when bright-eyed freshmen arrive for their congressional orientation. It is also the season of What Now? for the many officeholders and staffers who will be out of jobs in January. Not even former senators are free from the specter of college tuition bills.

"The first thing you do is, you buy a tin cup and pencils so that you can be assured of some income tomorrow," says former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, who, after finishing his second term in 2003, went on to head the American Council of Life Insurers and to write children's books.

Envy the lucky corporate recruiters and their ringing phones. Pity the members of Congress who hoped against hope that they wouldn't be looking for work right now.

Some of them don't even have résumés.

"It's probably been 20 or 30 years for some of these folks since they've looked for a job," says Nels Olson, who heads the Washington office of Korn/Ferry International, a headhunting firm.

On the other hand, in a few months these former members may be stinking rich in their new gigs, so maybe we shouldn't feel bad for them.

Washington's biennial job search is bigger than usual this year. In addition to members of Congress who are retiring or who lost their reelection bids, hundreds of Republican committee staffers may lose their jobs because Democrats are taking over the House and the Senate.

Too bad there's no way to measure the exchange of business cards in the nation's capital. Imagine the paper wasted. Imagine the traffic at Kinko's through December, with folks copying their cover letters. Some savvy staffers started making discreet calls about new jobs even before they knew the results of their bosses' reelection campaigns.

Oh, the exhilaration and exhaustion of the job search. Although former members of Congress are typically not reduced to perusing the classifieds, they are not immune to the pain of being rejected by prospective employers. The amount of money an outgoing member can command varies widely. A former member of Congress with a rock-star reputation might make, say, $2 million a year, says Olson. Another, lesser member might earn only a puny $300,000.

"Some are in great demand," says Robert Barnett, an attorney who has represented many high-profile government officials -- including Bill Clinton -- in their move to the private sector. "Others, unfortunately, have very, very few options."

This is one of the reasons that some firms use recruiters. Stuart Pape, the managing partner at the law firm Patton Boggs, says intermediaries minimize the "potential awkwardness" that might arise if a firm makes an unwanted overture to an outgoing member, or an outgoing member makes an unwanted overture to a firm.

And some former members don't transition well to the world of private industry. Perhaps they're not used to having people say no to them, or maybe they don't have much management acumen.