COMM 317: Lobbying and the First Amendment

Charles Krautheimer, who writes an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, isn't a guy I often agree with. He's a neo-conservative, and his instincts on foreign policy are a lot like Gen. George Armstrong Custer's (let's go pick a fight and decide later whether we can win it or not). But in today's Post he has a column called "In Defense of Lobbying." For once I agree with Krautheimer 100 percent, since he makes the same case I was trying to make in class the other day.

But Krautheimer makes it more eloquently than I did. Here's his lede:

Everyone knows the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. How many remember that, in addition, the First Amendment protects a fifth freedom -- to lobby?

Of course it doesn't use the word lobby. It calls it the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists are people hired to do that for you, so that you can actually stay home with the kids and remain gainfully employed rather than spend your life in the corridors of Washington.

Krautheimer employs one of the oldest rhetorical dodges in the book. He sets up a "straw man," and then he knocks it down. But his straw man is kind of clever. He says:

To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you'd think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.

The rest of the column is devoted to knocking down the straw man: Lobbying is good, especially when Republican presidential candidate John McCain's relations with lobbyists are questioned.

Krautheimer's job was made easier by an expose -- a "gotcha" story -- by The New York Times that hinted that McCain's politicial people had hinted that McCain may have had something that looks like an affair with a lobbyist for whom he got involved with a Federal Communications Commission case. Said Krautheimer:

It must be said of McCain that he has invited such astonishingly thin charges against him because he has made a career of ostentatiously questioning the motives and ethics of those who have resisted his campaign finance reform and other measures that he imagines will render Congress influence-free.

Ostentatious self-righteousness may be a sin, but it is not a scandal. Nor is it a crime or a form of corruption. The Times's story is a classic example of sloppy gotcha journalism. But it is also an example of how the demagoguery about lobbying has so penetrated the popular consciousness that the mere mention of it next to a prominent senator is thought to be enough to sustain an otherwise vaporous hit piece.

The score here, as I see it: Krautheimer 2, New York Times 0. He's right about the rumors about McCain, and he's right about lobbying.