Hey there Ken. I've just received your book and am much enjoying it. As with your original Harper's piece, you've managed to lay the issues out sharply and with the context that is usually lacking, and you've come up with anecdotes that are surprising and infuriating - and I say that having covered lobbying for some 15 years.

Now, to your questions:
Lobbyists are basically a whole other branch of government. Given that, they are often both expensive and ineffective, just like the legislative and executive branches. Lots of money spent on pricey K-Street firms probably doesn't accomplish much - and especially so with foreign countries as clients. As you point out, conditions have to be right for a member of Congress to want to go out on a limb for some shady regime or interest. That said, somebody in Washington is always ready to take their money.

At the same time, of course, lobbyists are in many ways the biggest bargains in America. As you note in your book, you could have hired a big time lobbying firm to secure you an earmark worth a couple of million, or, even more lucratively, a tax break - and for that, it is basically sky's the limit (note to all you politicians harping on about earmarks: sleazy tax breaks cost us multiples more money than piddling earmarks). Anyway, hiring a lobbyist to do this would have cost a couple hundred thousand at most; so it is a massive return on investment. I wrote a piece a while back about how companies that do business overseas (the investment banks, car companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, to name a few) ran a big and successful campaign at the beginning of the Bush administration to keep open a loophole that allowed them avoid paying something like $10 billion a year to the Treasury Dept. I don't remember how much the lobbyists running the campaign were getting, but I'd be surprised if it was more than $50,000 a month, and probably less. So yeah, lobbying is a hell of a bargain, if you can afford it. And of course it is always a risk, because you might lose.

Something else to note: the vast majority of what lobbyists are hired to do is not to pass new laws, but to kill them. That will be especially true next year with a Democratic controlled Congress and a reform minded (to what degree remains to be seen) administration. Health care reform, and the attempts to shape it, kill it, or water it down are going to keep hundreds of lobbyists, grassroots marketing operatives, PR flacks, and others very busy and very well paid in 2009 and probably well past it.

Yes we should be concerned. We need more disclosure and we need more limits on the revolving door. There is a reason that powerful members of Congress and the Administration and their aides receive top dollar salaries when they go to K-Street, just as there is a reason that corporations give lots of money to certain candidates and not to others. One thing the 2007 law didn't touch was grassroots lobbying which is largely unseen and pretty much unregulated. It is how the cigarette companies killed John McCain's tobacco-control legislation in 1998, and it is probably how lots of reform legislation is going to get killed or stalled next year.

I think the 2007 law did have some effect. Your lobbyist friend's cynical comment about speed limits actually proved the point: the majority of people do curb their speeding because of the threat they may get a ticket. It is true that people who want to play on the sleazy side of things will always find a way, but I think the new law did stop some abuses with junkets and it did slow the revolving door. Lobbyists will always find new ways to secure influence, whether it is ponying up for a lawmaker's favorite "charity" or simply raising money for them. The 2007 law left some issues untouched: for instance, while it largely banned lawmakers from taking corporate sponsored trips, it did nothing about trips sponsored by groups pushing foreign policy positions. Israel and Turkey were two favorite destinations for congressional junkets last year, as I remember. There is some very good info about trips put out by Legistorm.com. Disclosure is good.

I would be surprised if either Obama or McCain went any further in restricting the revolving door than they have already promised, and even then they'll stick close to the letter of their statements, if not the spirit (for evidence of McCain's slipperiness on the issue, you might check out a story I wrote with Jen DiMascio about the revolving door in McCain's Senate office). Even so, their vague promises to close the revolving door with their administration-to-be did leave a lot of folks on K-Street grumbling, so maybe it will have an effect.

Sam