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Originally Posted by djmcmath
How, exactly, does one become a lobbyist? I suppose you don't just wake up one morning and say, "Oh golly, I'm a lobbyist!" There must be some career path, or an application process, or something ... right?
Dan
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Allow me.
It's almost impossible to become a lobbyist unless you have extensive legislative or executive branch experience. Forget all that Schoolhouse Rock How a Bill Becomes a Law stuff. The way it really works is only known by those who've worked on the Hill, in the agencies or in the state houses. And you need a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of who's who, where they're from, what committees they're on and also know all the other staffers. Basically, you have to know how to get clients' problems solved.
Say you run a small factory that supplies some of the paper used to make dollar bills. And say there's a good chance of a major push for a new one dollar coin. Well, you're gonna be against that because it's gonna cut into your revenue severely if not lose you the contract.
But wait! Your congressman and senators aren't on the relevant committees and so they can't do much for you except vote against it once it comes to the floor. So you hire a lobbying firm in DC that specializes in government contracts and federal printing issues. They'll have a lobbyist on staff who will know everything there is to know about this issue, who the co-sponsors are, who their main constituencies are, when the bill is getting marked up in committee and who all the staffers are writing the bill. And that lobbyist either goes to bat for you or lines up meetings with senior staffers and brings you along to make the case yourself.
My best friend from Pittsburgh was just here in Phoenix today. He's from Johnstown orginally and his father runs a hospital out there. He's very close with John Murtha. One of Murtha's former staffers is his hospital's lobbyist. He told me he paid his lobbyist $250k one year and got $20 million in federal funding to cover vets displaced by a closed VA hospital due to too many empty beds. That's what you call a serious return on investment.