Free Power Game by Hedrick Smith

this traveler from far-distant Arizona. Now, hell, they come in here by the jetload every morning, educators and businessmen and whatever. Your day is full with Arizona people coming to see you.” 12
    For a senator or congressman, the time compression has become unbearable. “I’ve got two hundred lobbyists pressing to talk to me about the tax bill, each one representing some different interest,” Senator David Pryor of Arkansas shrugged helplessly. “And every time there’s a change in the tax bill that affects their industry or their group, those lobbyists want to talk to me again.” 13
    A look at the numbers shows how overloaded the system has become:
    • Lobbyists: Reporting standards are tougher now, but only 365 were registered with Congress in 1961 and 23,011 were registered with the secretary of the Senate in mid-1987 (a ratio of 43 to 1 for each member of the House and Senate).
    • Lawyers: The District of Columbia Bar Association listed 12,564 members in 1961 and 46,000 in 1987.
    • Journalists: 1,522 were accredited to Congressional press galleriesin 1961 and 5,250 in 1987; the 1980 census showed 12,612 journalists citywide.
    When Truman ordered dropping the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, I was told, he broke the news to the entire White House press corps—twenty-five reporters. By mid-1987, some 1,708 people had regular White House press passes. So enormous had the wider political community grown—lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, policy think tanks, defense or health consultants, and the hotels, offices, accountants, restaurants and the service industries that support them—that by 1979 this whole nongovernmental sector actually outnumbered federal government employees in Washington!
    Mail, too, illustrates the exponential growth. Congress is now drowned in a Niagara of constituent letters and postcards, mostly organized by lobbies and mass-generated by computers. In 1972, mail volume to the House of Representatives was 14.6 million pieces a year. But it jumped by 1985 to more than 225 million pieces—an average of more than half a million pieces a year per member.
    Sometimes lobby groups target a particularly sensitive date and a key member of Congress and then truck in mass computerized mail all at once for maximum psychological impact. They literally bury a member in one day’s mail. In 1984 and 1985, whenever Social Security recipients got worried about some imminent vote to freeze their cost-of-living adjustments, they would inundate House Speaker Tip O’Neill. When American trade negotiators were engaged in ticklish talks with Japan or European countries, then-Majority Leader Jim Wright got swamped more than once by the steel industry and other sectors hit by imports. On several occasions, O’Neill’s and Wright’s mail ran 5 million or 6 million pieces in a single day. The record, according to Bob Rota, the House postmaster, came in the summer of 1985 when Speaker O’Neill got 15 to 18 million pieces in one day.
    “Three big tractor trailers rolled up full of mail,” recalled Rota. “Those big trailers, you know, eighteen-wheelers. There was no way we could count it. The freight people weighed it and gave us an estimate of the volume. Those trucks were blocking our whole area up here. We had to find rooms to store the mail and get those big trucks out of there. You wouldn’t believe the mail the members receive: car keys from people with notes saying ‘Unlock the economy,’ pieces of two-by-fours from the homebuilders with the message ‘Cut the budget across the board.’ One year we had hundreds of thousands of baby chicks from farmers upset about high interest rates.” 14
    Money and Razzle-dazzle
    Business has led the new political rush to Washington. Obviously business leaders have worked their influence in Washington for more than a century. But a new surge of corporate involvement came in the late 1970s. Initially it was a reaction to the consumer activism of Ralph Nader and