Activist/Lobbying Orgs Fail Again

It’s my none-too-humble opinion that most lobbying organizations, that is to say organizations whose sole purpose is to lobby the government, are both failures and frauds. There are exceptions, like the venerable ACLU, the Sierra Club, and other established lobbying groups who defend whole swaths of ideological territory like civil liberties and environmentalism. There, however, “success,” or rather exemption from the failure of lobbying peers, lies only in an established commitment to principal; it in no way implies that these groups are not making the same mistakes.
One of those mistakes is lobbyist boilerplate, bane of newspaper editors and Congressional staffers alike. The NY Times has an article that discusses the stupid, wasteful, and ultimately ineffective practice of sending pre-fab form editorials to media around the country. Some editors are now Googling to check against “form editorials,” and I can’t blame them. These groups are shooting themselves in the foot with tactics like this, and form letters to representatives fair little better.

These lobbying organizations have an agenda that supersedes their stated cause, and that is continuing to exist. People get jobs at these places, get cozy, and want to stay long after they’ve met their goals, or realized they never will. So some become perpetual underdogs, “fighting the good fight” in a manner that doesn’t work, towards an end they can’t reach. Others expand, taking on whatever cause will get them funded and pay the rent on that K Street office for another year. Either way, they don’t work smart, and they don’t work for their supporters.

But what, other than vote and protest, is a concerned citizen to do? These lobbying intermediaries do what an individual can do, but in bulk: email, postal mail, faxes, phone calls. None of this incurs anything more than a form response, as is fair enough to a pre-fab political hailing. If voting, as demonstrated in our last Presidential election, has no effect, we turn to lobbying, trying another route to make our numbers known. If lobbying politicians and media fails, as it clearly has, we protest in the streets. If protests are merely acknowledged, as with this past round of anti-war marches, where then do we turn for democratic satisfaction? We can’t all afford $300 per head private lunch/audiences with our leaders, and even if we could, it remains a poor and short-term investment in your beliefs. So what’s next for the average US citizen with a cause? Suicide bombing?