Hyperdemocracy

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That lobbying has embraced the middle classes hardly means it's now an equal-opportunity enterprise. Wealthy people can still afford more of it, and the poor are still on the sidelines. Housing projects aren't leading targets for direct-mail solicitations. Still, lobbying has gotten more egalitarian, more democratic, as technology has made mobilizing groups cheaper.

On its face, that seems fine. If we must have lobbyists, they might as well represent regular people, not just oil barons. The trouble is that regular people, like oil barons, are usually asking for money, whether in the form of crop subsidies for farmers, tax breaks for shopkeepers, Medicare or Social Security payments, or various other benefits. So the increasingly "democratic" face of interest groups means the American government is asked to pay more, which means finally Americans of all classes are too. And the ultimate cost could be larger still. The budget deficit is not only a grave problem in itself, a theft of resources from the next generation, but also one reason politicians feel too strapped for cash to earnestly confront the other leading contender for gravest problem: the existence of an urban underclass. This sort of predicament is what the Founders designed representative democracy to solve. "They saw the public interest as a transcendent thing that enlightened people would be able to see and promote. It wasn't just a question of adding up all the interests," says historian Gordon Wood, author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

American University political scientist James Thurber, author of the forthcoming book Remaking Congress, calls politics in the information age "hyperpluralism." He remembers sitting in congressional hearings for the 1986 tax-reform law as lobbyists watched the proceedings with cellular phones at the ready. "They started dialing the instant anyone in that room even thought about changing a tax break." Their calls alerted interested parties and brought a deluge of protest borne by phone, letter or fax. "There is no buffer allowing Representatives to think about what's going on," Thurber says. "In the old days you had a few months or weeks, at least a few days. Now you may have a few seconds before the wave hits."

The firms that orchestrate those waves from special interests often describe themselves as nonideological. But it is inherent in special-interest work that they will time and again be employed to defend the budget deficit against brutal assault at the hands of fiscal responsibility. When in February 1993 President Clinton proposed an energy tax that was hailed by economists and environmentalists, something called the Energy Tax Policy Alliance paid for a fatal multimedia campaign. When he suggested in the same budget plan cutting the business-lunch deduction from 80% to 50%, it was the National Restaurant Association that stirred to action, sending local TV stations satellite feeds of busboys and waitresses fretting about their imperiled jobs. And the restaurateurs hired Jack Bonner to roll out the Astroturf. "I see it as the triumph of democracy," Bonner said of his livelihood in a Washington Post interview. "In a democracy, the more groups taking their message to the people outside the Beltway and the more people taking their message to Congress, the better off the system is."