Lobbyists and big government

Confronted with the now undeniable reality that President Barack Obama's vaunted agenda of hope and change is increasingly viewed by the American people as smoke and mirrors, elements of the media have gone into full spin mode. The problem lies not with the Obama administration, they explain, but with Washington itself. George Packer kicked off this meme in the New Yorker a few weeks ago with a lengthy article bemoaning the "broken" state of the Senate.

Writing in the current issue of Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum one-ups Packer by arguing that it is not just the Senate which is broken, but Washington itself. The American people are being denied the full awesomeness of the Obama administration by a series of flawed institutions which simply can't handle the intellectual hurricane that is President Obama. Although Purdum mostly devotes himself to portraying the White House as an island of sanity in a raging sea of madness, he does make a few legitimate points, perhaps the most notable of which is the relationship between the growth of the federal government and the legions of lobbyists which have descended on the nation's capital:

The Federal Register is published every working day and contains the text of new government regulations, presidential decrees, administrative orders, and proposed rules and public notices. The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you’ll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items.

You can think of the Federal Register as the official record of federal activity in all its range. You can also think of it as the daily report card of the lobbying industry, whose interests and resources underlie nearly every line of type. There is hardly a large private company in the country not dependent on some kind of government contract, and hardly a business of any size that is not subject to some kind of government oversight.

...Lobbyists had their biggest year ever in 2009, with expenditures of $3.5 billion, or $1.3 million for each hour that Congress was in session, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The total number of officially registered lobbyists in Washington is now about 11,000, down from a peak of nearly 15,000 in 2007, due in part to new restrictions. But that number doesn’t come close to reflecting reality. Current law requires someone to “register” as a lobbyist only if he or she spends at least 20 percent of the time lobbying.

And yet much of the real work of lobbying is not done by registered lobbyists at all but by the rainmaker lawyers and former politicians, like Vernon Jordan and Tom Daschle, who “counsel” private-sector companies on how to thread the needle and achieve their objectives. If you throw in all the people doing “government outreach” and “congressional liaison” at the countless trade associations and advocacy groups, the total number of people in Washington working to influence the government in one way or another actually runs closer to 90,000. There were 2,500 registered lobbyists working on financial-industry reform—mainly against it—or roughly five for each member of Congress.

The uncomfortable truth the left must face is that if it truly desires to clean up politics, the only real solution is taking an axe to the size and power of the federal government. The proximity of lobbyists to a massive government is no more surprising than a swarm of flies on a big carcass.