There is one permanent fact that can make a legislators job much less confusing: politics has only two power sources; the lobby and voters. All political actors, including media and activists, derive their influence from one or both of these sources.
Trying to succeed on grassroots issues the same way lobby succeeds on its issue isn’t possible. The different nature of these two power sources ensure this.
The most important difference is that the lobby pays attention to everything, and the grassroots only see the most visible things. This isn’t a criticism of the grassroots, it’s just a practical fact. The lobby gets paid a lot of money to watch, and participate in, everything. The grassroots can’t give this kind of sustained attention for obvious reasons.
The grassroots takes longer to get going, but when it does it cannot be stopped. Appropriating grassroots power is impossible without creating the kind of visibility that grassroots radar is equipped to detect.
Grassroots visibility comes from an issue containing three basic factors: simplicity, urgency, and build-up. Without any of these three, real grassroots legislation ends up being visible only to the lobby, giving it zero chance of passing.
For this reason legislative strategy is apples and oranges for special interest legislators and grassroots legislators.
Lobby legislation
Lobby legislators do a lot of tricks and deals because they have a very low bar to meet. All they must do is obscure an issue enough that the the issue’s visibility (simplicity, urgency, build-up) stays low. This is why they get to do ingenious-looking things that, in reality, aren’t very hard.
Visibility can be kept low by making legislation highly complicated-sounding. This damages the simplicity factor of visibility.
Visibility can be kept low by putting a cover story designed to appeal to the grassroots. This damages the urgency factor by giving it a “some good guys like it, some don’t” gloss.
What is urgency? Urgency is about whether or not a bill addresses a known problem. Real problems that are nevertheless unknown in the grassroots must be consistently messaged before a bill addressing it has enough urgency to attract grassroots power.
Lobby legislation is even stronger with a cover story and “card carrying” conservative, freshly wooed off the reservation, carrying it. People think, “Surely something even one of the good guys supports isn’t urgent, right?”
Finally, the lobby can do bad things when the grassroots know nothing of it. That is why they operate at such low volume levels.
This is also why, when lobby legislators can’t convince grassroots legislators to back off of something that would hurt the lobby, the next thing the lobby legislators ask the grassroots guys to do is – pretty please – do not talk about it publicly. However tough their posturing is, they are saying, “if you’re going to expose us, can you at least expose us less?”
The lobby passes bad bills when grassroots visibility is low, usually because one or more of the following factors is absent: simplicity, urgency, and build-up.
What do these factors mean for success for grassroots issues, and how does all of this apply to the first few weeks of the session? We’ll return to that next week.