Lobbyist Says It’s About Information, Not Influence

WASHINGTON — On the eve of a critical Congressional vote last week on a sweeping measure to regulate Wall Street, the prominent lobbyist Tony Podesta met with one of the lawmakers to go over some final language and discuss the effect it could have on his many corporate clients.

“He exaggerates our power, but he increases demand for our services,” Tony Podesta said of President Obama.
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Once that was over, Mr. Podesta pivoted back to another client, BP, to help the company navigate Congressional waters and, in short, try to prevent an ugly situation from getting even uglier.

For weeks now, the two biggest issues in Congress have been cleaning up Wall Street and cleaning up the Gulf Coast. To the surprise of no one in the capital’s K Street corridor, Mr. Podesta — Democratic fund-raiser, avid art collector and member of a family brand in Washington — has had a big hand in both. And medical companies have also been drawn to his firm, particularly in the wake of the health care legislation.

In a remarkable season of lobbying, business is booming for the Podesta Group, already one of Washington’s biggest players. It has become particularly lucrative for firms like Mr. Podesta’s that are skilled at wielding influence in Congress, the center of epic debates on health care, bailouts and financial regulations.

“We’ve been dealing with some very big issues,” he said with a bit of understatement.

For lobbyists, the Obama legislative agenda has been a veritable full-employment program, with 2,500 working just on financial regulation alone.

The results are often buried deep in the fine print.

On Wall Street regulation, for instance, Mr. Podesta lobbied on 25 different issues for major players like Bank of America as well as smaller companies.

He recently represented a “person to person” lender, Prosper Marketplace, which makes loans over the Internet. The company worried about the prospect of coming under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which insisted that Prosper should be treated as an investment firm.

Mr. Podesta and lobbyists at his firm, including Israel Klein, a former top aide to Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, worked through a number of senior Democratic allies in both the House and the Senate.

Among those they lobbied to resist the S.E.C.’s purview included Representative Barney Frank, the Financial Services Committee chairman; Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the banking committee chairman; Senator Barbara Boxer of California; and Mr. Schumer. Once the Podesta team realized it could not defeat the idea, it resorted to an old Washington standby — delay by study.

In the end, House and Senate negotiators agreed last week to a government study, delaying federal jurisdiction and possible S.E.C. oversight.

“It wasn’t a total loss,” Mr. Podesta said. “We ended up in the middle.”

On BP, Mr. Podesta has acted mainly as a liaison between Congressional investigators and the embattled company. For instance, the firm helped to work out a schedule to give BP more time to turn over corporate documents in the face of a dozen Congressional hearings.

Mr. Podesta, a garrulous, gravelly voiced man known for his bold neckwear, is part of the elite group of lobbyists atop the industry who move easily between black-tie fund-raisers on Embassy Row and closed meetings on Capitol Hill. Despite the recession, lobbying scandals and frequent denunciation from President Obama about their outsize influence, lobbyists are more in demand than ever.

“The irony of it is that every time the president says we lobbyists have all this influence, people who don’t have a lobbyist want one,” Mr. Podesta said in an interview. “He exaggerates our power, but he increases demand for our services.”

Revenue for the more than 11,000 federal lobbyists rose 5 percent last year, to more than $3.5 billion, and fees at the Podesta Group have more than doubled since 2006, to $25.7 million last year, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

General Dynamics, the big military contractor, and Genzyme, the biotech company, pay half a million dollars or more a year for the firm’s services. In four years, the Podesta Group has tripled its staff of lobbyists.

Mr. Podesta waves his hand dismissively and chortles when discussing the criticism and new restrictions that lobbyists face from the White House.

“Whatever they’re gonna do, they’ll do,” he said. “They can ban lobbyists from having drivers licenses. We’ll all get cars and drivers.”

The obvious friction between Mr. Podesta and the White House has an added dimension; his brother and former partner, John Podesta, headed up Mr. Obama’s presidential transition and is a crucial presidential ally.

Some prospective clients, in fact, will contact Mr. Podesta because of his brother’s ties to Mr. Obama. “People approach us and say, ‘Can you call your brother and get him to call the president,’ and we’ll say, ‘No.’ It’s not what we do. We don’t do access lobbying.”

Mr. Podesta does some work with the White House despite the tension, but his lobbying is directed mainly on Congress, where debate has focused on huge and historic measures.

In a capital fragmented by politics, the best lobbyists “are able to work across fields and across branches of government — and even across political parties,” said Rogan Kersh, a New York University professor who studies lobbying.

“A Tony Podesta isn’t going to wave a magic wand and make all of BP’s problems go away,” he said, “but his clients are going to get a blueprint for how to succeed in official Washington.”

Mr. Podesta’s status has made him a target, too; advocates for campaign finance reform dressed as “Founding Fathers” picketed in the lobby of his building this week.