Lobbying, which is now a more than $3 billion industry, is also one of the hottest stories in Washington. The tales of now-jailed former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, including his lavish golfing trips to Scotland and other efforts to bribe lawmakers and staff, both fascinated the public and confirmed its worst stereotypes about lobbyists. The fallout from Abramoff's deeds continues today as lobbyists have to contend with new rules and increased scrutiny, as well as punishing rhetoric from lawmakers and President Obama about their undue influence in Washington.

So it's good timing for Robert Kaiser. The veteran Washington Post reporter and editor just produced a new book on lobbying, called So Damn Much Money, that focuses on the story of Gerald Cassidy, the founder of successful lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates. Cassidy, a former Capitol Hill aide, is widely credited with coming up with the idea for earmarks, the term for targeted projects in spending bills. Kaiser's book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding lobbying, the history of K Street and its profound role in how Washington works. National Journal's Bara Vaida sat down to talk with Kaiser about the book on Feb. 23. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.

NJ: Why did you decide to write this book and focus on Cassidy?

Kaiser: I had an idea of writing a mostly historical book about Washington as the capital of the deal.... I started thinking about that, and I thought the historical part would be easy, but I'd also have to [look at] one or two modern deals, and to do that I had to learn something about a subject which I'd written about and talked about endlessly and realized I didn't know very much about in fact -- which was Washington lobbying....

So I persuaded the editors here at the time that I should do an explanatory investigative project on Washington lobbying, and I set out to find windows through which I could look at this subject. And a colleague, [then-fellow Post reporter] Chuck Babcock, said, "You ought to look at the SEC records." There is an S-1 that was filed by Cassidy & Associates when they thought about going public. An S-1 is the document you have to file to take a company public, and it's supposed to reveal why anyone would want to invest in your company. Cassidy and his lawyer did a very honest and thorough job in that S-1. It became a wonderful road map for me to see how the company worked -- how it made money, what its techniques were, what it relied on, and so on. So having discovered and read this document and poked around... it looked like a good possible case study. So I went over to see Cassidy and he agreed to meet me, and I went to his elegant office and I said, "Bad luck -- I am going to pick on you. I am going to write about lobbyists, and you are going to be my main character."

NJ: It's interesting to me that despite being a reporter here a long time that you said you didn't know that much about lobbying.

Kaiser: I knew all the superficial clichés about lobbying. I knew that it was a big business; I knew that people were making big money at it, but I didn't know how it worked. The fun of this was to find out how it works. When you really learn something like this, you learn the secrets of the temple. You learn how much of it is phony -- how many dollars are wasted by big corporations hiring lobbyists who claim to accomplish things that do get accomplished but the lobbyists didn't have a hell of a lot to do with. That is a common maneuver here. A lot of lobbying is bluster. Like all good salesmanship, you know, it's based on patter and charm.

And then the other side that I did not understand as well as I do now is the interdependency that has grown up between the Hill and downtown. I don't think many citizens understand the degree to which these two worlds do depend on each other now. The Hill needs the money that the lobbyist community helps them raise, and the lobbyists need the access that the money affords them. They both depend on it.

NJ: Are lobbyists evil?

Kaiser: No. That's a really good question, I think -- an important point. Lobbying is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution just the way you and I are protected by the same amendment, and it should be. There is nothing more democratic than citizens pressing a case on the government for or against something. It happened in Jamestown -- in the first English settlement in the New World -- petitioning the governor for redress of grievances for a change in policies.... It's an old and established idea, and the people that do it are not inherently bad people at all. The problem is the money and how dependent everybody has gotten on it.

NJ: Is there any way out of that besides public financing?

Kaiser: An aggressive attempt to alter the culture could succeed. It would never eliminate greed or corruption or any of the human failings that are permanent fixtures of our condition. But I have an idea that gets a good response on my book tour: Why not require every official on the Hill and the executive branch to file a report via e-mail to a central reporting location every evening before they go home from work -- "here are the lobbyists I met today, and here's what we talked about" -- just the subject matter. I think that would have a really positive impact. It would not end lobbying, and it shouldn't, but it would make sure that lobbying was much more straight-up and transparent than it usually is. And I think it could really change the atmosphere. You could also require people to say who they are going to meet with tomorrow. We know this from experience: If a public figure has to explain why she's doing what she's doing, she does it differently than if she doesn't have to explain it to anybody.

NJ: What do you think about what Obama has done so far with regard to lobbyists?

Kaiser: I think it is a real change. One of the things you see in this book, I hope, is the deleterious nature of the revolving door.... We got to the point in the early part of this new century where young people were coming to Washington to work in the government for a couple of years merely to punch a ticket on their way to K Street -- they saw public service as just a prelude to cashing in. This whole idea of cashing in on public service for private gain really became fashionable in the years that I'm writing about in this book. And Obama's executive order says that if you work for me in the executive branch, you can't leave the government, become a lobbyist and come back and lobby my administration for as long as it exists. That would be at least through 2012 and maybe through 2016. And I think that would preclude any lobbying firm from hiring such a person, because no one wants to pay a high salary to someone who can't lobby for some indefinitely long period. You can do this in the Congress, too.

NJ: In the book you made a point of talking about the ethical ambiguity of lobbying, which I found interesting. Could you talk more about that?

Angels And DevilsLobbying has been a part of civic life since Jamestown, and it resists easy categorization as "good" or "evil." Read about its complex history in an excerpt from Robert Kaiser's book, So Damn Much Money.

Kaiser: One thing I learned talking to lots of people for this book is how widespread the understanding is that the money aspect of this is bad. Although there are exceptions to this, most members of Congress hate the fundraising. And I realized -- which I hadn't before -- how demeaning the fundraising is. I mean, imagine, you're a senator of the United States, and you think of yourself as a member of the world's greatest deliberative body and all that nonsense, and here you are spending a day or two a week, every week, all the time, dialing for dollars -- calling people up and pleading for campaign contributions. I mean, how sad; how demeaning. And yet they're all afraid not to do it, and they're all afraid to try to change the system because by definition, if you're an incumbent senator, it has worked for you. The lobbyists, most of them, either are totally cynical and resigned to this -- and I put Cassidy in that category -- or they really resent it....

Around this ugly system there is an enormous amount of rationalization: "Well, it's just the way things are."... But if we could give everybody in town truth serum, we wouldn't have very many people say this is a great way to do business. On the contrary, everybody knows that it smells bad, everybody knows that it's demeaning, and nobody's proud of their participation -- or almost nobody.

NJ: There was a recent University of Michigan study that looked at campaign contributions and whether they really buy votes. And what they found is that it affects agenda, not votes.

Kaiser: I think the political scientists who do that kind of thing are looking at the problem too narrowly. In the book I argue that the big effect of this whole system has been to avoid dealing with the big issues, the big problems of the country -- that avoidance in the world of partisan deadlock and all-out political warfare which this system has fed and encouraged. No one has a real interest in figuring out how to pay for Medicare and Social Security for the Baby Boomers, for example. I use this example because it's such a classic. We've all known for years and years, because it's a simple matter of demography, that Social Security and Medicare were running out of money and would have to be changed somehow.... And now we have the problem. And Obama is trying to at least talk about it seriously for the first time in a long time. But all the big problems, including -- we now know, importantly -- the regulation of American capitalism, have been run away from, have been ignored, because the biggest power of lobbying is not making things happen; it's preventing things from happening. Playing defense is what's easiest and often most rewarding for the client.

NJ: What will change this culture?

Kaiser: A new public morality. A new sense of what is OK. That's the big opportunity here. And you know, the society changes. I am extremely impressed by the fact that a remarkably high percentage of the seniors at Yale and Princeton and Harvard and other great schools are applying for Teach for America. There is a new sense of public spirit in what's being called the "millennial generation" that gets born after 1985, I guess. It's a real change. These pendulums all swing back and forth. It's interesting that the 1920s was one of the most corrupt eras in American political history and the 1930s was a time of noble public service led by FDR and the New Deal. That probably isn't a coincidence. I see stirrings of something similar in Obama. He is going to try to be an FDR for our time here.

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