Lis­ten­ing to Barack Obama through­out his pri­mary cam­paign and all dur­ing his cam­paign for the White House I was increas­ingly filled with a sense of fore­bod­ing for the lob­by­ists of Amer­ica.  What were they going to do?  I was afraid they would be among those who just fall through the cracks in the social safety net.  Some of them had already endured some pow­er­ful shocks. Like Tom Daschle, who actu­ally paid his taxes, and you could tell it left him feel­ing bit­ter and disoriented.

So, like I said, I was wor­ried about them.  I was just about to reg­is­ter the web­site Feed​-the​-Pup​peteers​.com to raise funds to help them get through the lean times.  Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans were out of work, their 401k’s deflated, their hous­ing val­ues trashed, and they didn’t have a pres­i­dent after them deter­mined to reduce their influ­ence.  How much direr it must be to be a lobbyist.

Well, accord­ing to Politico, I needn’t have wor­ried.

Washington’s influ­ence indus­try is on track to shat­ter last year’s record $3.3 bil­lion spent to lobby Con­gress and the rest of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment — and that’s with a down econ­omy and about 1,500 fewer reg­is­tered lob­by­ists in town, accord­ing to data col­lected by the Cen­ter for Respon­sive Politics.

Many lob­by­ing firms have escaped the worst of the cor­po­rate belt-​​tightening, thanks, in large part, to the ambi­tious agenda set out by Pres­i­dent Barack Obama

When Obama said he was going to cur­tail the influ­ence of lob­by­ists was he refer­ring to their fash­ion influ­ence?  Or their influ­ence on the archi­tec­ture in the nation’s capi­tol? [empha­sis mine]

“Lob­by­ists love it … when you’ve got an activist agenda like this, and you’ve got seri­ous prob­lems like this, and peo­ple want to do some­thing about it,” said James Thurber, direc­tor of Amer­i­can University’s Cen­ter for Con­gres­sional and Pres­i­den­tial Studies.

“It is the most active time that I have ever seen in the advo­cacy busi­ness — from 1973 on,” Thurber added.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lob­by­ist whose shop deals mostly with finan­cial ser­vices and health care issues. “It’s been a tremen­dously busy year, and it’s going to keep get­ting that way,” the lob­by­ist said, not­ing that both health care and finan­cial reform will remain active as con­gres­sional action moves from draft­ing leg­is­la­tion to imple­men­ta­tion to the inevitable fixes.

Well, I’m glad we got an influence-​​curbing pres­i­dent now.  Imag­ine what it would be like if you-​​know-​​who were still in office.

The year-​​end lob­by­ing expen­di­ture fig­ures don’t come out until late Jan­u­ary, but Thurber and oth­ers pre­dict that the top line num­ber will exceed the $3.3 bil­lion spent in 2008. Groups spent $2.5 bil­lion dur­ing the first three quar­ters of 2009, which is a slightly faster quar­terly pace than 2008, accord­ing to CRP.

I won­der where they spent all that money.

Maybe Barack would know.  He cur­tailed lob­by­ists’ influ­ence, after all.  Truly, he really does seem to be

A Post-​​Rational President.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Lobbyist Welfare, reality