Advocacy

If there was one guy a brand-new lobbyist wanted to hear from, this was it.  I had just been appointed as a volunteer lobbyist for my state’s college counseling organization, and this was my first visit to Washington in that capacity.  The trip had more than its share of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moments, including one where a more seasoned lobbyist caught me staring up at the gorgeous ceiling of Union Station just a little too long (“be careful, that’s when the pickpockets get you”). But this meeting was the one most everyone was waiting for, a session with someone universally respected for bringing student needs to the attention of key policy makers, and getting them to listen.

It didn’t disappoint.  “You need to remember that you are the expert.  You’re a counselor, a teacher, a college person who helps kids get into college.  These are data points to them.  To you, they’re the student whose dad spent the college fund on unexpected surgery, the student with no parents at all.  You want to make the struggle for college access real to anyone in Washington?  You know the students and their stories.  You’re the expert.”

He went on.  “If for some reason that doesn’t work, ask the person you’re talking to about their own kids, especially if they work in Congress.  Members of Congress have to try and raise their kids in one home, while they spend most of the week living in another, and that raises lots of guilt. If you don’t have their attention, ask them about their kids, then let them sit with that for a moment.  You’ll have their attention.”

Finally, and almost as an afterthought, he talked about what was then an upcoming election.  “The thing you have to understand about elections is that everyone wants to keep their job.  You do, I do, and so does your member of Congress.  You might look at elections as the exercise of democracy, but if your member of Congress loses this election, they don’t have a job anymore, and they have to go through what we all have to go through to get another one.  So yeah, they want to keep their job, and they’ll most likely do whatever they need to do to keep it.”

This was about 35 years ago, but the lessons I learned that day have stayed with me, especially the last one.  It’s easy to read the headlines and join in the social media discussions that question the backbone of elected officials.  It’s even easier to call them into question when they are the key vote on an issue that might seem to shift power, or take away opportunities.

What’s hard to do is remember that they leave Washington on Friday evening to spend the weekend in their home states, where they attend a lot of Boy Scout pancake breakfasts and cider mill openings with the folks back home—the ones who put them in Washington—who may have their own way of seeing the world.  As Edmund Burke first noted, it’s tough when elected officials have to choose between doing what they think is in the country’s best interests, and doing what constituents want you to do.  It’s even tougher when one of those constituents is holding on to his little girl’s hand at the church picnic, telling you that what you see as a difficult vote next week could put him out of a job.

These are tough times, to be sure.  They are just as tough for the people shaping them.

Fall Nights

The window is wide with no humidity
Only cricket serenade pushing in
Filling a room that subtly glows
With light from ill-fitting shades
The cat cinnamon rolled at the bed’s edge.
It is the room’s second lullaby
The underscore of her resting breaths
A vocal pas de deux I wake to several times
Finding it fresh and new
At one, three, and five.
Love finds me on either side
The waking dream
The dream awake
Surrounded
By all forever should be.

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