North Maple Rag

So, I’m going on this lobbying trip to DC and we had a briefing meeting today. Lobbying is something I know a little about, or at least, I’ve met with a lot of lobbyists. During the briefing, I felt like I was holding back a lot of advice that I thought would be helpful to the other students going on the trip (although, despite that, I think I still might’ve come across as a bit obnoxious).

I think effective lobbying involves a great deal of psychology and there are a number of fairly safe generalizations that can be made about Congressional staffers. I found that my co-workers and I tended to be impressed and annoyed by many of the same things. We also, in broad terms, fit into a certain personality profile and had common weaknesses and strengths that could be exploited. In my office, I’m pretty sure those personality traits were a big part of why we hired and some of them might have been specific to our group. That said, most of those traits are appeared to me to be pretty common across the spectrum of staffers.

For example, when lobbyists would come in and only talk at me, I tended to tune out and start doing other work in my head (and I know others did this – ask me about the aliens sometime). The exception to that rule was people who had unique and distinctly compelling personal stories to share, but they were few and far between.

The best lobbyists can listen to all the canned stuff staffers have to say and still find ways to get something out of the meeting. A lot of people I met with forgot to think about what they were going to do if my Senator happened to agree with them. Often, when I would say that he supported their position, they’d let the meeting end there. Smart lobbyists, however, take that opportunity to position themselves or their organization as some kind of trusted ally thereby creating future opportunities to have influence.

Anyway, I’m sorry, this is probably boring and I’m sure most of these things are intuitive, but I’ve had fun thinking about it today. I’m usually kind of anti-lobbying, but for this afternoon, at least, I’ve been thinking that with the right organization and the right issues, maybe (and I mean that very hesitantly) this is something I could do.