New tactics alter flavor of lobbying

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/

Rory Reid wants stricter lobbying, ethics rules

Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid said state government needs to be more transparent and loopholes in state ethics laws closed "so that Nevadans have faith in their government."





During stops in both Northern and Southern Nevada on Thursday, Reid, a Democrat who is running for governor, outlined his policy plan to tighten state ethics laws and impose tougher penalties on those who violate them.


"There's obvious deficiencies in existing Nevada law," Reid said. "(For example), a legislator could pass an agency's budget while at the same time lobby that agency for a private party. That doesn't engender confidence."


He said he would work to extend the period for legislators who leave office to two years before they could lobby their former colleagues.


Another example Reid cited is that even if an elected official is found to have violated state ethics laws, there is virtually no penalty unless the violation is determined to be "willful." He said he would mandate ethics education for elected officials, state employees and lobbyists and said any violation of state ethics laws should come with a penalty.


"If they violate it, there should be strict liability," he said. "There are all kinds of loopholes that need to be closed."


That includes members of the governor's staff, he said.


"I want my administration to be open and transparent so people understand why I'm doing what I'm doing," Reid said.


To that end, he said, his schedule would be posted on the Internet daily, he would hold weekly press conferences and periodic town hall meetings across the state.


He said any individuals he appoints to boards would be required to sign "a code of responsibility" and disclose any instances where they have a potential conflict of interest.


Reid said he also wants to tighten rules for lobbying.


"To get Nevada back on track, we need to create a foundation of trust," he said.

Source:rgj.com/

What Houston's Gay Mayor Means for Texas

Houston Mayor-elect Annise Parker, center, celebrates her runoff election victory with her partner Kathy Hubbard, left, at a campaign party in Houston on Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009

David J. Phillip / AP






The news that a lesbian had been elected mayor of Houston, deep in the heart of the conservative South, was greeted with surprise this week. After defeats on gay marriage in places deemed far more gay-friendly than Texas, like Maine and New York, the victory of Annise Parker, who is in a committed relationship with two children, was a welcome, if puzzling, achievement for advocates of gay rights. The mayor-elect's photograph, smiling sweetly and looking like Barbara Bush, was plastered everywhere from the Drudge Report to China's Xinhua news service, shattering all manner of cliches about Texas, lesbians and politics in the "Old South."

Gay rights activists were buoyed. "The fact that an openly gay candidate wins for mayor in the nation's fourth-largest city, in the South, in Texas, shows that when Americans get to know gay people as people, not as stereotypes, their resistance to treating gay people equally reduces," Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry, a gay marriage advocacy group, told USA Today.
(See a two-minute bio of Annise Parker.)

However, despite the worldwide headlines, Parker's victory will have little resonance on a statewide scale. Houston is a place Republicans like Governor Rick Perry and his primary challenger U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison go for fundraisers, not votes. Indeed, the moderate G.O.P. votes that Parker won can come at a price for a Republican in a primary race. Candidates endorsed by Log Cabin Republicans, a G.O.P. gay rights lobby, have come under fire from noted anti-gay campaigners, including Houston physician Steven Hotze, whose political action committee sent out a last minute anti-Parker flier. Hotze also is reported to have pressured statewide Republican judicial candidates to back away from endorsements from gay groups or face primary opposition. (Hutchison has won some praise in the past from Log Cabin Republicans for her support for hate crimes legislation.)
(See a pictorial history of the U.S. struggle for gay rights.)

In terms of geography, Houston may be a city in the Old South, but its personality is mix of Western frontier and Third World boomtown: dynamic, diverse, a place to make a fortune and lose one. Only 40% of greater Houston area residents live inside the Loop , the freeway that defines Houston's city limits, and only one million of the city's 2.2 million residents are registered voters. Many are immigrants who cannot vote. The key to winning any Houston mayor's race is coalition building and Parker's political career has been deliberate, "low risk" and "canny," according to Richard Murray, a veteran political analyst and University of Houston political science professor. Her political journey echoes, to some degree, that of Houston's only other female mayor, Kathy Whitmire. Like Whitmire, Parker used the job of city controller as a jumping off point; built on her base in Houston's Montrose neighborhood, the heart of the city's large gay community; and reached out to vital constituencies, like African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and moderate, affluent Republicans.

Indeed, Parker's victory may come down to that old adage: all politics is local. The 53-year-old former bookshop owner and energy sector professional was well known to Houston voters. This was her seventh successful citywide election (she had won three times for an at-large city council seat and three times to serve as the city's controller). Parker did not make her personal lifetsyle an issue, running on a platform of fiscal conservatism, budget discipline and a promise to hire a new police chief who would translate some of the recent large police budget increases for into actual cops on patrol.
(See the Top 10 News Stories of 2009)


Parker's opponent in the runoff was a fellow Democrat, Gene Locke who was also familiar to voters. A lawyer and lobbyist for the city of Houston, he won the backing of Houston's business leadership. An African-American, Locke could have pulled key support from the black community but he ran a "pretty bad campaign," according to Murray. The late revelation that two members of his finance committee had supported Hotze's anti-gay PAC did not help Locke with moderate Republican voters, who saw the issue as not central to the vote. The business establishment, which originally felt Parker could not win, cooled to their chosen candidate as the runoff campaign evolved, Murray says, and Parker was able to win the race 53% to 47%. Turnout also was low — just 16.5% — meaning candidate better organized to get out the vote would win.

As for her being gay, Murray explains that Houston's voters "are not that caught up in lifestyle politics... Across the whole country attitudes have been evolving about issues like civil unions and Texas is still part of the United States of America." It should also be noted, says Murray, that while Gov. Perry's anti-Washington jibes may resonate in Houston's conservative suburbs, they have less inpact inside Houston's city limits, where 62% of the voters cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.

Todd Hill, a gay Democratic activist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, argues that Parker's win does have a wider meaning. "I don't believe that Parker's victory gives life to wider LGBT agenda initiatives. But I do believe that her election gives momentum toward qualified, experienced and politically savvy gay candidates running for public office," he wrote on the Burnt Orange political blog. Gay candidates have won a seat on the Fort Worth city council and as sheriff in Dallas. Gay candidates must work at the local level, Hill says, building a record and a political bench. "If you want to really make a mark, and move elements of the LGBT agenda forward, get members of our community elected into positions of political power," Hill urged.

It is the grassroots route that Parker adopted over 18 years ago and while she acknowledged that her victory was a significant moment for the gay community, she also told the Houston Chronicle: "One of the reasons I'm not having that big, excited, happy feeling is that there is a lot of work to be done... I"m going to be the mom telling you to eat your vegetables [or] you don't get dessert." After all, local politics is not about the savoring the glory, its about delivering the goods.

Source:time.com/