Here comes the book

And here I am abusing my Substack to try to flog it.

It was around this time last year when I was visiting with my first boss in the professional world, Richard H. Johnson, a good friend and a mentor from back in the days of The Freeman’s Journal in the early 1980s. There we were in his home in Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado, and I told him I was struggling with the bones of a book about my career as a lobbyist in Albany.

“The world is not waiting for a book about being a lobbyist,” he cautioned. He urged me instead to start a website with essays and columns and the like – rather like this little Substack deal I have running from time to time.

Against Richard’s always-accurate advice, I finished the book about lobbying for which the world is not waiting. Certain to sell at least the 20 copies I’m buying, Lobbying 101 is an effort to explain what it was I did for a living for the bulk of my professional career.

“Potrikus, no one is waiting for a book about lobbying.” Richard Johnson, October 2022.

Book publishing is a pretty egalitarian pursuit these days. Rather than chase down an agent and try to convince him or her that yes, the world is waiting to read my book about being a lobbyist, I published the thing on my own. It’s all through Amazon’s Kindle Direct which, once I figured out the process, was as advertised: direct. Beginning October 23, it’ll be digital for Kindle users ($9.95, friends!) and, for those who like the physical media, in paperback (a mere $14.95 of your hard-earned monies!).

The fun part is they will make it available to any bookstores out there clamoring to sell it. They print the paperback only after it has been ordered – but miraculously, it still shows up in the mailbox a mere three days or so after ordering. That beats the alternative – heading off to a vanity publishing service that would’ve required me to buy 1,000 copies and then store them in my garage while I try to sell them. I don’t have that kind of permanent storage space, thanks.

Here's the nifty Amazon link. They'll add the paperback on October 23.

Anyway: here’s the obligatory plug for the book. I’ll admit it’s rather a gas to see my name on Amazon.com (a company whose no-tax policy I fought for nearly 20 years, so yes, you’ll be paying sales tax) as an author. It’s available beginning October 23. If you read it, I’d be delighted to know your thoughts.

And in case you’re stuck inside this weekend, here’s the introduction. There are a couple sweary words in there, but they’re direct quotes. They’re the only sweary bits in the book.

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Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t, like …

The day hadn’t gone well and it was barely noon. New York’s state Legislature was down to its final two session days for the year. The pressure was on for every lobbyist and lawmaker carrying a do-or-die list. Albany’s late-June heat and humidity were on full blast.

And the most pedantic ideologue expert from the biggest dues payer in the Retail Council of New York State – the trade association for which I worked – had me chasing after legislation that had no chance of survival. He had been calling. A lot. A great guy, but one of those people locked in a corporate office building more than one thousand miles away from Albany and so singularly focused on his own area of purist lawbook expertise that he was stubbornly unwilling to accept the political realities that stood in the way of a bill he thought made perfect sense. I dutifully ran around the Capitol trying to get a read on its prognosis, bouncing between the Senate and Assembly chambers on the building’s third floor.

The bill’s Assembly sponsor spotted me trying to get his attention in his Chamber’s east lobby and called me to the ‘members only’ tables that crowd the end of the hallway to the right of the Chamber’s entrance.

“Do you have a ‘Plan B’?” he asked. “We’re dead the way it’s written.”

Exact details escape me now, but the measure would have required the state to refund prepaid sales tax proceeds to big consumer credit companies if a credit card holder defaulted on debt and failed to hold up his end of the consumer-paid-sales-tax law. New York is not predisposed to such benevolence, and we were rolling a big ball up a steep hill.

But with an Assembly member offering to argue in his Democratic Majority’s private conference in favor of a hyper-technical bill caught up in the end-of-Session slog with the clock ticking (i.e., forget it), I thought even the idea of a Plan B was generous on his part. There wasn’t much time. We hashed out a couple concepts he thought he could take to his conference and I thought I could take back to our association members.

I was working the issue with one of Albany’s better-known lobbyists who represented key players in the state’s financial service industry. Not always the most sympathetic characters in New York’s state Legislature. She held fast to one strategy: go to the mat for the bill in its original incarnation.

Fair enough, I suppose, but I always found that to be most effective when one is more genuinely interested in keeping a client on a retainer for another fruitless year. Bills rarely get passed without compromise.

The Assembly member offered to call her to float the ideas we had just whipped up. I left a telephone message for my friendly pedantic dues-payer and took the two flights of stairs from the Chamber down to the state Capitol’s first-floor cafeteria for lunch.

Being the end of the year’s session, the place was packed. Legislators, lobbyists, and staff jammed the tables. I joined the long line to buy a sandwich. A few minutes later, the financial services lobbyist barged in and marched up to me.

“What the hell did you just DO?” she demanded. “I just got off the phone and found out you signed off on some watered-down piece of SHIT!”

My first reaction was that uh-oh moment of sheer panic – the one you feel when you break a glass at your in-laws’ house or hit ‘reply to all’ on an e-mail not meant for all. I said something about needing a Plan B.

“You don’t go for a fucking Plan B,” she shouted with her index finger pointed up into my face. “You stick with the bill and fight for it!”

“Hang on,” I reeled then rallied, but only slightly. “Shouldn’t we at least try to get something?”

She glared at me and, loudly enough for a lot of legislators, lobbyists, staff, and visitors in the cafeteria to hear, said this:

“Clearly you need to go back to Lobbying 101.”

This public dressdown was rare in Albany’s everyone-knows-everyone-else lobbying community. I ran out to do requisite damage control with my dues-payer because I knew bad news would travel fast. When I returned to the Capitol that afternoon, many camped in the Senate’s lobby buzzed about the high-noon cafeteria showdown.

The bill never got its ‘Plan B’ and died its expected death. The doomed ‘Plan A’ returned unamended in subsequent years and never went anywhere – but having that bill in print was enough to give any interested parties out there a glimmer of hope that this time, this year, political stars could align. That would be enough for a clever lobbyist to sell hope to a willfully ignorant client for a nifty retainer renewal. I spent my time trying to explain to our eager member why he should just forget about it.

• • •

Over the years, I thought a lot about that “Lobbying 101” insult and whether there’s such a class to take. Or whether it even was an insult. It may well have been solid advice. There are plenty of thoughtful and rigorous political science dissertations and worthy degrees in public policy, public administration, and, of course, law. Not so many, though, about the practice of lobbying or the importance of its practical role in the policy-making process.

If there were an Intro to Lobbying class, what would it teach? Would it be for people who wanted to learn theory, or practice?

I hope like any entry-level class it might cast a broad net and attract anyone who’s ever picked up a newspaper and sneered at the story about how lobbyists affected the outcome of one issue or another. People who think about the process and wonder, “Gee, how could I become a lobbyist?” Those who read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (or at least positioned it carefully enough on the bookshelf as an impressive backdrop for those Zoom meetings) and noted a parallel between an overambitious public official and a lobbyist who believes that he or she – not the policy at hand or the lawmaker charged to enact it – is the center of the power universe. Perhaps those who sheepishly admit in mixed company that they are, indeed, a professional lobbyist. And those who want to know stories about how public policy ideas become public policy reality.