Mickey Goes to Washington

Leaders ofthe Discover America Partnership lobbying effort -- Jay Rasulo of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Stevan Porter of Inter-Continental Hotels Group and Jonathan Tisch of Loews Hotels -- at an event designed to persuade the federal government to fund a $200 million tourism marketing campaign. (Jay L. Clendenin - )

The majority of people who lobby do so indirectly, through tele-marketing, advertising and the like, and none of them have to identify themselves to the public.

James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University and a lobbying expert, puts the number of lobbyists (including supporting staffs) at about 261,000, twice as many as eight years ago. Fees paid to individual registered lobbyists also have doubled during the Bush administration, to more than $2 billion a year.

The explosion in the size of K Street, the locus of the lobbying industry, is an extension of the growth and reach of government. The ballooning federal budget has its tentacles in every aspect of American life and commerce. No serious industry or interest can function without monitoring, and at least trying to manipulate, Washington's decision makers. The penalty for ignoring the federal government can run into the billions of dollars. Just ask Microsoft. The software giant was hit with an antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department in the late 1990s and, in 2001, agreed to alter the way it packaged its computer operating system. Before then, it had mostly ignored the nation's capital.

Bad mistake. Chastened by its defeat, Microsoft has built a powerhouse presence in Washington, as have scores of other companies and industries. Lobbyists argue that it's a relatively cheap investment. The Carmen Group, a mid-size lobbying firm, regularly compares its clients' costs with the benefits it says they receive from lobbying. In its latest internal assessment, Carmen said it collected $15 million in fees from about 70 clients and delivered $1.5 billion in assistance -- measured both in benefits received and in burdens avoided -- a return ratio of roughly 1 to 100. Most clients still part with their lobbying dollars grudgingly. But they do part with them, which is why new buildings are going up all the time to accommodate the industry's growth. Want a former senator to guarantee a meeting with a current senator? No problem. Half the senators who leave Congress for the private sector register to lobby. Need to know the history of a tax law and whom best to ask to change it? Easy. At least half a dozen consulting firms are composed of nothing but former congressional tax aides and Treasury Department officials who know as much as, and probably more than, the current people inside.

And why wouldn't ex-lawmakers and aides gravitate to K Street? Lobbying jobs pay at least twice and sometimes three times government salaries. Serving in government is now viewed by many on Capitol Hill as a steppingstone to a lucrative career in bending government to the whims of paying clients. In many ways, lobbying now mimics the government it targets. It has become a bureaucracy, with its own language, its own peculiar ways of doing business and, most important, its own instinct to survive.

Indeed, the last thing any lobbyist wants is to win everything his or her client is seeking. That would mean an end to a retainer, the closing of the feedbag. Success for a lobbyist is not outright victory but, rather, just enough progress to justify the creation of an elaborate and well-funded lobbying apparatus. Even outright failure can underscore the need to lobby harder.

Lobbying is Washington's version of a perpetual motion machine. Once it gets revved up, it rarely stops running. In fact, it tends to grow.

RASULO WAS DETERMINED TO BUILD A MODERN-DAY LOBBYING MACHINE. The old-fashioned methods, with a reliance on access and fundraising, clearly were not working for the travel industry anymore. Back in 2004, he and others in the hospitality business thought they had finally persuaded the federal government to spend $50 million on an advertising campaign abroad. But the $50 million was slashed to $6 million by the Commerce Department and then frittered away on a pilot program in the United Kingdom.

That collapse was sadly typical. Although travel and tourism is one of the nation's largest and most profitable industries, it had what Roger Dow, the new president of the Travel Industry Association, called a "Rodney Dangerfield lobby" in Washington. It never got much respect.

"We're lousy," Rasulo declared. In the mid-1990s, in fact, one of the few federal agencies that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich was able to eliminate as part of his government-downsizing push was the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration.

Part of the problem was organizational. The Travel Industry Association was well known for putting together tourism trade shows. The American Hotel & Lodging Association was an expert in franchising. For them, lobbying was not a top priority. The gap was so obvious that a decade earlier some of the industry's most active chief executives had set up a separate lobbying organization called the Travel Business Roundtable.

"The feeling of the CEOs was that there was a void in government affairs," said Jonathan M. Tisch, chief executive of Loews Hotels and chairman of the Roundtable.