I agree with much that has been said below. I’ll add a few observations, all of which are from personal experience.
The first observation is trivial. Politicians are not in the job for a salary. The top politicians can sell anything to anyone. If they were in it for the money, they would sell something on commission and retire early. (Enterprise software or outsourcing come to mind.)
Second, before you lobby someone, you give enough campaign donations to be on the list of people who can get a meeting. Or you find someone who is, to broker a meeting. This is the only place where campaign contributions actually have any effect in my experience. And there are substitutes for this. If you can bring together a bunch of voters to listen to a talk, or deliver a couple dozen volunteers, you’re just as in as Mr. Moneybags.
Third, before your meeting, you have to figure out whether the politician is going to lean for you or against you. They will always have some kind of lean. You adjust your pitch to match their kind of rhetoric. When going to meet the Republican, you wear the clothes of growth and freedom. When you go to meet the Democrat, you slip into jobs and fairness. There’s almost no issue where a business is going to have nothing to say on one side of that divide. If you believe the politician will lean for you, you give them all the positive reasons that bolster a decision in your favor, to give them mental momentum to ignore contrary advice. (No, you don’t try to logically defuse objections. Logic is for amateurs. Go with the herd by invoking the power of cliche.) If you believe the politician will lean against you, you go in with a list of disasters that will inevitably result from the politician going with that lean. All of these terrible things will mean that people will blame you, Senator! If politicians are good at anything, it is spotting incoming blame and avoiding it like the plague. (Again, logic is for punks. Use the herd instinct to start a stampede the other way.)
Fourth, politicians believe their own press. For the most part, they genuinely believe the things that come out their mouths. (That is probably less true in the executive positions than in the legislative ones, because executives have to make excuses for flunkies who went off the reservation. See below re: team sport.) So, they genuinely believe that they are motivated by compassion, freedom, or whatever. If you suggest to them that they are motivated by campaign contributions, they would be offended because they would think themselves wronged. The trick that most of them use on themselves is the intention heuristic: if I mean well, I must be doing the right thing. If it went wrong, someone else must be evil. This belief in their own goodness is intimately tied up with their status as a doing-better do-gooder, which is always partly a matter of self-perception. So, when you suggest to a politician that he’s motivated by campaign contributions, don’t be surprised when the reaction is literally, “Do you know who I am?!?!?!?”
Finally, politics is a team sport. Democrats call Republicans Nazis. Republicans call Democrats Commies. Each side has to embrace that adverse label a little. Being shunned on your own side means you don’t get a heads-up when blame is incoming. That is why conformity is an instrumental value in politicians. For lobbyists, it is very profitable to have one politician broker a meeting with another politician. It’s a signal that “the herd is over here. Why don’t you join us?” In politics, you can be a Nazi; or you can be a Commie; or you can be dead. (And “dead” includes “moved to the private sector” and “spending time with family.”)
I agree with much that has been said below. I’ll add a few observations, all of which are from personal experience.
The first observation is trivial. Politicians are not in the job for a salary. The top politicians can sell anything to anyone. If they were in it for the money, they would sell something on commission and retire early. (Enterprise software or outsourcing come to mind.)
Second, before you lobby someone, you give enough campaign donations to be on the list of people who can get a meeting. Or you find someone who is, to broker a meeting. This is the only place where campaign contributions actually have any effect in my experience. And there are substitutes for this. If you can bring together a bunch of voters to listen to a talk, or deliver a couple dozen volunteers, you’re just as in as Mr. Moneybags.
Third, before your meeting, you have to figure out whether the politician is going to lean for you or against you. They will always have some kind of lean. You adjust your pitch to match their kind of rhetoric. When going to meet the Republican, you wear the clothes of growth and freedom. When you go to meet the Democrat, you slip into jobs and fairness. There’s almost no issue where a business is going to have nothing to say on one side of that divide. If you believe the politician will lean for you, you give them all the positive reasons that bolster a decision in your favor, to give them mental momentum to ignore contrary advice. (No, you don’t try to logically defuse objections. Logic is for amateurs. Go with the herd by invoking the power of cliche.) If you believe the politician will lean against you, you go in with a list of disasters that will inevitably result from the politician going with that lean. All of these terrible things will mean that people will blame you, Senator! If politicians are good at anything, it is spotting incoming blame and avoiding it like the plague. (Again, logic is for punks. Use the herd instinct to start a stampede the other way.)
Fourth, politicians believe their own press. For the most part, they genuinely believe the things that come out their mouths. (That is probably less true in the executive positions than in the legislative ones, because executives have to make excuses for flunkies who went off the reservation. See below re: team sport.) So, they genuinely believe that they are motivated by compassion, freedom, or whatever. If you suggest to them that they are motivated by campaign contributions, they would be offended because they would think themselves wronged. The trick that most of them use on themselves is the intention heuristic: if I mean well, I must be doing the right thing. If it went wrong, someone else must be evil. This belief in their own goodness is intimately tied up with their status as a doing-better do-gooder, which is always partly a matter of self-perception. So, when you suggest to a politician that he’s motivated by campaign contributions, don’t be surprised when the reaction is literally, “Do you know who I am?!?!?!?”
Finally, politics is a team sport. Democrats call Republicans Nazis. Republicans call Democrats Commies. Each side has to embrace that adverse label a little. Being shunned on your own side means you don’t get a heads-up when blame is incoming. That is why conformity is an instrumental value in politicians. For lobbyists, it is very profitable to have one politician broker a meeting with another politician. It’s a signal that “the herd is over here. Why don’t you join us?” In politics, you can be a Nazi; or you can be a Commie; or you can be dead. (And “dead” includes “moved to the private sector” and “spending time with family.”)
All from personal experience.
Max L.