Scott Mooneyham: The grass tops need mowing

Back in the spring, letters began arriving at the offices of U.S. Sens. Kay Hagan and Richard Burr from state legislators critical of the health care reform proposals bouncing around Washington.

I don’t know how many letters, or which legislators wrote them.

I’ve called Hagan’s office twice, sent an e-mail once, asking for the information. The Democrat’s staff hasn’t had the good sense to even formally refuse the request. And just a year ago, when she was a state senator, I could actually stroll over to her desk on the N.C. Senate floor on any day and talk to the real article. Ain’t Washington grand?

A spokesman for Burr, our Republican U.S. senator, said constituent letters typically aren’t deemed to be public records. My response: What about when they are written by people in their official capacity as public officeholders, with official letterheads at the top and at some expense to the people of the state of North Carolina?

He needed to talk to the staff’s lawyer and would get back to me. He didn’t.

So, sans letters, I guess I’ll just have to do the best I can to guess at what we might have seen if I had a couple in hand.

I suspect these letters, which I’ve been assured were written, would have come from Democrats and Republicans. And I suspect they would have looked pretty similar.

Why? Because they wouldn’t have really been written by the state legislators or even their staffs.

Insurance companies would have provided the text of the letters, convincing legislators close to Hagan or Burr to put their names to them.

But if you think the trail ends there, you’d be wrong. Even the public relations pros inside the insurance companies may not have done the writing.

In Washington, you see, lobbying firms specialize in this kind of thing. It’s called grass-tops lobbying. And these firms could oversee the entire mission, including the writing, from start to finish.

The point of this type of lobbying isn’t to generate broad-based support for some policy or piece of legislation. It’s to get a select group of influential people to call on their favorite member of Congress, hence “grass tops” rather than “grassroots.”

As the New York Times put it a decade ago, “The goal is to figure out to whom a member of Congress cannot say no: his chief donor, his campaign manager, a political mentor. The lobbyist then tries to persuade that person to take his client’s side.”

For some people, putting your name to something you didn’t write is a firing offense. It is for me.

In the political world, that’s not the case.

Maybe that’s OK. Certainly, historians won’t be looking at the correspondence of current-day politicians in anticipation of some Lincolnesque letter.

If they do, they might spend 40 years tracking down which political consultant actually wrote it.

Scott Mooneyham

Capitol Press Association