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Marshalling K Street?s battalions for CAFTA
By Patrick O'Connor

“This is the morning of the election,� Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told a crowd of lobbyists the day the House voted on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

Hundreds of trade-friendly lobbyists had crowded into the sparse, artificially lighted conference room in the Capitol basement that morning to show their support for the controversial bill. An hour earlier, in the same room, President Bush made a personal appeal to the entire Republican conference on behalf of his embattled trade legislation.

As this final meeting of coalition lobbyists came to a close, Cantor reminded them to keep calling members until an hour before the vote and encouraged them to find local business owners to do the same.

These lobbyists were among the bill’s most vocal supporters, especially during the winter months when the White House was focused on Social Security and Congress was grappling with ethics questions surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). But prospects for the trade bill still were uncertain July 27, and Cantor was reminding the loyalists to finish strong.

During their decade in the majority, Republican House leaders have fortified the historic bond between Congress and K Street, creating one well-oiled coalition of outside lobbyists after another. Leadership has used these coalitions to pass a variety of hard-to-pass bills. Coalition outreach was crucial in passing CAFTA, but in the end the toughest jobs fell to leadership and the administration.

The following is a description of the pro-CAFTA coalition and an inside look at some of the leadership negotiations with reluctant supporters of the bill.

Coalitions coalesce
In February, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), whose job it is to win tough votes, encountered Republican lobbyist Kirsten Chadwick in a Capitol hallway and told her to start organizing a coalition in support of CAFTA.

A White House veteran with extensive trade experience, Chadwick was lent to leadership from the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers from America’s largest corporations that had an existing contract with Chadwick’s firm, Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock.

On the Democratic side, the Roundtable had hired Steve Champlin of the Duberstein Group, who helped build Democratic support for the bill.

The Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and the Emergency Coalition on Trade (ECAT) established an outside coalition in support of the bill soon after then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick signed the deal in May 2004. They had already established a communications arms and held 100 meetings with member offices before the end of last year.

The overall coalition was already divided into subgroups to deal with industry-specific problems, so Pork Producers lobbyist Nick Giordano, for example, was in charge of agricultural outreach in support of the legislation. Chadwick spoke frequently with these subgroups.

She began meeting with Blunt’s staff in April, and she and Sam Geduldig on Blunt’s staff held the first of their weekly coalition meetings May 5. During each of those meetings, Chadwick would announce a list of members whom she had assembled and then assign lobbyists or subgroups to contact those members about particular issues.

These coalition lobbyists gathered information about where individual members stood and shared that intelligence with Blunt and his staff. The information flowed up from the lobbyists to Chadwick, often in the form of grassroots reports â€â€