WASHINGTON - -- For decades, the National Restaurant Association was the poster child for the unbreakable alliance between Washington's business lobbyists and the Republican Party.
One of the most potent grass-roots lobbying groups in the capital, the group helped kill Bill Clinton's health care plan, bankrolled Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, and year after year helped drive stakes through such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage and protecting the environment.
But something strange happened after Barack Obama became president: Courted and cosseted by savvy White House political operatives, the National Restaurant Association and some other business powerhouses changed their stripes.
The "other NRA," for example, ousted its conservative leader and installed a more pragmatic chief executive. It began to take meetings with once-hated Democratic politicians, including White House aides. And when the titanic battle over health care began, the restaurant group broke ranks with such unreconstructed business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and declined to attack the White House.
The shift is a tale of changing political tides, the ultimate practicality of business executives and of a successful Obama White House effort to reach out for allies among traditional adversaries. And it's beginning to change the balance of power inside the Beltway.
The new strategy embraced by the restaurant group and others such as the Business Roundtable has allowed them access to Democratic decision-makers and a chance to influence or at least mitigate proposed policy changes.
"The political landscape changed so dramatically over a short period of time that we had to make a decision on how to respond," said Jot Condie, president and CEO of the California Restaurant Association, who is on the board of the national group. "Are we going to lob bombs from afar and understand that return fire will kill us? Or should we try to mitigate legislation that is a relative certainty?"
The restaurant association began to shed its conservative aura in late 2007, installing Dawn Sweeney, a longtime Washington player known for pragmatism, bipartisanship and marketing savvy, as its first woman CEO.
The organization continued to meet with conservatives, but it also began talking with consumer activists, Democratic party leaders and White House officials.
"What we are trying to do is see how we can be at the table," Sweeney said. "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu."
When the health care battle came to a boil this fall, the National Restaurant Association was among those that broke ranks with such business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, declining to join their "Start Over" coalition that has launched an advertising campaign against the reform bills in key states.
The decision, along with those made by the drug industry and a handful of other business trade associations, helped Democrats keep their initiative moving. It also gave the National Restaurant Association access to the White House and to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, allowing them to be heard on key issues, such as whether small business would be exempted from some of the new law's requirements.
On the eve of the Senate's health care vote Dec. 23, Sweeney entered the White House gates to meet with, among others, the Obama family's personal chef, Sam Kass.
Sweeney, who represents the interests of the megachains such as McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, also discussed first lady Michelle Obama's plans for combating childhood obesity.
"We should play a leading role," she said.
She took a similar approach, dubbed "mitigation and damage control" by members of her board, to consumer activists' demands that the health care bill include provisions on restaurant nutrition labeling.
Sweeney and her board members met with food safety activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest to hammer out a precedent-setting industry-consumer deal on the issue. The compromise, forwarded to the House and Senate health committees, provided that calorie information be printed on menus, but more detailed information such as fat and cholesterol content would be available on request.
Sweeney has not endorsed the recently passed Senate bill, but she is able to tell her members that the excesses of earlier proposals were dropped thanks in part to the restaurant group's participation. And she notes that effective lobbying killed efforts to tax soft drinks, one of the most profitable items for restaurants, in the name of reducing obesity.
Her new friends at the White House have helped provide access to the Commerce Department, where Sweeney is in the early stages of developing a proposal that would have likely stunned her predecessors: using stimulus funds to encourage Americans to dine out and support the restaurant industry.
Sweeney makes the case that "restaurants are major providers of jobs, employing 13 million individuals in restaurants nationwide," making it the second-largest private sector employer in the country, after health care.
In November, Sweeney was one of 13 trade association chiefs invited to meet with Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama's health care czar. Sweeney laid out a handful of specific fixes that could win her organization's support.
Among them: Exempt small businesses from the law's penalties, change the calculation for defining part-time workers to allow for the seasonal fluctuations in the industry, and raise the minimum time allowed for complying with paperwork and registration requirements.
Those proposals alarm labor advocates, who see them as a way for employers to avoid providing benefits to workers.
Yet, most were adopted, at least partially, in the Senate bill, and Sweeney hopes for further gains when House and Senate leaders meet to reconcile their meetings.
Neil Trautwein of the National Retail Federation credits the Obama White House for tactical brilliance in finding ways to split the business community on health care.
"The genius of the administration's approach was to set broad principles and allow Congress to fill in the details," he said. "This immediately divided the focus of outside groups and ... it delayed development of a unified opposition."
Source:chicagotribune.com/
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