Soloway: We're a trade association of about 330 different companies of all sizes -- there are a lot of small companies up to very large ones -- and the thing that unifies our membership is, despite all their diverse capabilities and sizes and so forth, they all perform services to support the federal government. Our role as a trade association is to be their eyes and ears and voice....
When you think about a transition and all the different elements of a transition, obviously like everybody else -- be they a labor union, the banking industry, sporting clubs, whatever it might be -- everybody has an interest in where the new administration is going to go on the policy issues that affect their market. And in the government contracting area, no industry is more controlled, regulated and driven by policy.
Soloway: [Obama's] agenda is very much technology-driven, government performance-driven. Both of those goals require a really high-quality partnership with the private sector, which means the government has to have really good people to oversee, manage, award and evaluate what contractors are doing. I think you will see a focus on his part in this area. This is probably the single toughest issue the new president will face when it comes to the management and performance of government.
Q. What are special interest groups doing to prepare for the transition?
Soloway: I did note -- and I come out of the last Democratic administration -- that Senator Obama redefined special interests and decided special interests were defined as "corporate lobbyists," which I think is an odd description, because there are lobbyists for just about every interest there is in the world.... None is automatically better than the other, other than some obvious fringe groups that we don't have to talk about. So when I talk about special interests, I'm talking about labor unions, public employee unions, industry.... To view special interests as a monolith is really kind of a waste of time. It doesn't give you much insight.
That said, nobody's waiting for November 5. There's an awful lot going on in most organizations thinking about what a transition means to them. To the extent that they have policy papers and policy positions they want to be considered, they're trying to get them in to the right people. They are making their voice heard....
As a new administration comes into town, there will be an avalanche of proposals that they receive instantly from every special interest. I love the term "special interest," because it's a true term but it's misleading. Everybody's a special interest....
So there's an avalanche of paper, and the trick for the new administration is to try and parse through it and figure out how much of it is useful and valuable. But a lot of the initial policy thinking for the first 100 days, 180 days, is done in advance by the administration... so nobody waits till November 5. These are conversations that have been going on indirectly and directly for months.
Soloway: It's not about pulling a fast one.... I think administration officials ought to use special interest groups as a resource. They always have an agenda... and their agenda may or may not align with the public's interest and with your agenda as a government official....
But it's your job as the senior official to make that determination. The biggest mistake you could make is to assume that -- because a special interest group may come from a part of the political environment that you don't think you agree with -- that you don't listen to them, because they may have some nuggets that you haven't thought about. In fact, in some cases, it's better to listen to people who disagree with you than those who agree with you, because you tend to learn more....
That's actually how we, in our organization, approach our lobbying. We very rarely go up with a 2-by-4. You sit down and figure out, "OK, what's the objective you're trying to get to, and from our perspective here are three or four things you might want to think about and here's other ways you might get there."...
We're not peddling influence. We're peddling information, and if the information is lousy, we're not going to get invited back in the door again.... When you have those open dialogues, that's when you find interesting alliances that can actually get something done.
Soloway: I don't know that you're going to see a dramatic change. There are always going to be lobbyists, there's always going to be trade organizations, professional organizations, labor unions, environmental groups, health care groups -- everything you can imagine that have issues they want to talk about -- and that is part of the democratic process. It's actually a very healthy part of it.Listen to a snapshot of the interview:
One of the things that was interesting in the campaign was, for instance, that Senator Obama -- and again, I came out of a Democratic administration -- didn't allow campaign contributions from registered lobbyists, nor did he allow registered lobbyists to be part of his campaign team and very heavily has criticized Senator McCain for that. To me, that didn't make a lot of sense, because the people who pay the lobbyists were part of the campaign.... There were a lot of false dichotomies created that probably won't survive and really belong left in the world of campaign rhetoric.
There's no question that there have been some significant ethics challenges in government over the last number of years. But you can point to almost any administration where you've had that. And the sad truth is -- and it's not acceptable, but it's true -- is when you have now 4,000 political appointees in government, even if only 1 percent of them do something really abhorrent, that's 40 people. That's a lot of press time, that's a lot of issues.
Where I think we have to be careful is to make sure -- whatever new ethics rules that a new administration wants to put in place -- that we don't overweight them so much that it makes it impossible for people to come into government.... This administration and the latter part of the Clinton administration did struggle with this a bit, and it's getting harder and harder. And you have 4,000 political positions to fill in government fairly quickly; what you can't afford is to have large numbers of people saying, "I can't come in under those rules." That's not to say they get to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical, but you can over-regulate it to a point that defeats the broader mission of government. Balancing those things out is going to be important....
When people refer to "the K Street crowd," they're not referring to trade associations or labor unions, they're talking about the law firms and lobbying firms that have a plethora of clients. Anybody who believes that that industry is going away doesn't understand the way Washington works.
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