The Hollow Core: Interests in National Policy Making.

• Author: Birnbaum, Jeffrey H.

The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making.

John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Robert L. Nelson, and Robert H. Salisbury.

Harvard University Press, $39.95

Just over two years ago, a large group of top government officials sequestered themselves in a converted bar at the Officers Club of Andrews Air Force Base. Theft purpose was to negotiate in complete secrecy the sensitive details of what would later become the 1990 deficit reduction act.

But one enterprising lobbyist was able to break their isolation. Frederick Graefe, a partner in the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, was a former marine who still had friends in the military. One of them was an officer at Andrews, who, at Graefe's request, told the guards at the main gate to allow Graefe onto the base whenever he wanted--ostensibly to play golf. What the lobbyist did instead was wait in the Officers Club parking lot for his friends on lawmakers' staffs to come out and brief him on the talks. Just in case he was caught, Graefe always kept his golf clubs with him.

As this story illustrates, lobbying knows no bounds in the nation's capital. It also operates almost completely without regulation. Indeed, professional lobbying is one of the last rogue industries in America. With revenues in the billions of dollars and participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands, lobbying is a big business getting bigger all the time. But thanks to official inauention, the four separate lobbying registration laws on the books are toothless and ineffective. Lobbyists like Graefe ply their trade free of serious scrutiny by either government or the public at large.

Now comes another book that tries to pull back the veil on lobbying. The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making, is a serious, academic examination of how lobbyists operate in Washington. It isn't the kind of book that anyone other than a graduate student in political science would ever want to cuddle up with in front of a fireplace. And its main message isn't very sexy: Lobbyists struggle to get their way in a highly uncertain and ever-changing policy environment. But, perhaps inadvertently, the book also helps shed some light on the important and, until recently, almost completely furtive business of influence peddling.

Buried in over 400 pages of thick analysis, The Hollow Core contains data compiled over several years that quantifies how pervasive and sophisticated modern-day lobbying has become. In effect, the book concludes that lobbyists these days are much different than their caricature. They aren't fat...