‘They are not my people’: Barack Obama on lobbying and lobbyists

• Published date: 01 August 2013
• Date: 01 August 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1481

■Academic Paper

‘They are not my people’: Barack Obama

on lobbying and lobbyists

Conor McGrath*

Dublin, Republic of Ireland

This article traces the development of Barack Obama’s sometimes ambiguous and sometimes antithetical attitudes

and relationship to lobbyists. During his childhood in Indonesia, his stepfther was a lobbyist for a US oil company.

Obama engaged himself in what many would consider to be lobbying in his career as a ‘community activist’in

Chicago. As an Illinois state senator, he befriended lobbyists and enjoyed poker and basketball games with them,

in addition to raising about two thirds of his campaign finance from big business, unions, and political action com-

mittees. In the US Sen ate, Obama involved in ethics reform s that curbed the influence of lobbyists. His presidential

campaign rhetoric was hard-hitting, often decrying the irresponsibility of lobbyists while he had a number of lob-

byistsinkeypositionsinhiscampaignteam.Onhisfirst full day in office, President Obama signed an executive

order restricting lobbyists from working in his administration. He later banned registered lobbyists from having per-

sonal meeting with officials about econo mic stimulus projects. Both these pledges h ave, however, had unforeseen or

unwelcome consequences. More recently, Obama decided to ban lobbyists from membership of federal advisory

panels but continues to meet frequently with favored lobbyists and corporate executives behind closed doors. The

article questions whether Obama’s history in this area adds up to a coherent or principled track record or whether

it simply relates a series of inconsistent and political decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that

their days of setting the agenda in Washington are

over. I have done more than any other candidate in

this race to take on lobbyists—and won. They have

not funded my campaign, they will not run my

White House, and they will not drown out the voices

of the American people when I am president.

This is Barack Obama’s best known quote on lobby-

ists, from a speech in Des Moines on 10 November

2007 and then featured on the homepage on his first

presidential campaign’s website homepage for a

year.

1

I take it as the standard he is prepared to be

judged against and against which his actions in

office should be measured. First, though, it is in-

structive to review several key phases in Obama’s

life—his childhood, his career as a ‘community or-

ganizer’, and his time as a State Senator in Illinois

and then a US Senator in Washington—which offer

insight into how he interacted with lobbyists before

entering the White House, so that we can assess his

current policies on lobbying in a fuller context.

CHILDHOOD

Aspects of Barack Obama’s childhood have been

pored over, seemingly endlessly, by journa lists and

political opponents—his relationships with his par-

ents, the precise details of his birth certificate, his

youthful drug taking, and his exposure to Islamic

teaching, among other issues. One feature of his

younger years, which has, however, prompted little

comment, is the fact that his stepfather was a lobby-

ist. Obama does briefly mention this fact in the first

*Correspondence to: Conor McGrath, 10 Newbridge Avenue,

Sandymount, Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland.

E-mail: conor.p.mcgrath@gmail.com

1

Only the eagle-eyed noticed at the time (Tapper, 2007) that the

quotation used on Obama’s 2008 campaign website differed

slightly—but significantly—from the prepared text of his original

remarks. At Des Moines, he actually said that lobbyists ‘will not

get a job in my White House’(Obama, 2007), but on his website

this became ‘will not run my White House’.

Journal of Public Affairs

Volume 13 Number 3 pp 308–328 (2013)

Published online 25 June 2013 in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.1481

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

volume of his memoirs, but it has gone largely

unnoticed.

2

Obama’s mother met Lolo Soetoro in

1963 while they were both students at the Univer-

sity of Hawaii. In March 1965, they married, but in

June 1966, Soetoro’s student visa expired and he

returned to Indonesia and its new government un-

der President Suharto (Maraniss, 2012). In October

1967, Obama (then aged 6 years) and his mother

joined Soetoro in Jakarta. Initially, Soetoro served

as a geologist in the Indonesian army, but later

found a job as a lobbyist at Union Oil (Remnick,

2010). This is related by Obama (2008a: 46-47):

With the help of his brother-in-law, he landed a

new job in the government relations office of an

American oil company. We moved to a house in

a better neighborhood; a car replaced the motor-

cycle ...Lolo could sign for our dinners at a com-

pany club.

In this post, Soetoro would have acted as an inter-

mediary between Union Oil and the Suharto re-

gime, which received substantial backing from US

energy interests.

The young Obama’s notion of what lobbyists did

and how they behaved was not a favorable one:

Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother

arguing in their bedroom, usually about her re-

fusal to attend his company dinner parties, where

American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana

would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms

they had greased to obtain the new offshore dril-

ling rights, while their wives complained to my

mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He

would ask her how it would look for him to go

alone, and remind her that these were her own

people, and my mother’s voice would rise to al-

most a shout. They are not my people (Obama,

2008a: 47 [emphasis in the original]).

And so the first lobbyist Obama ever knew may

have left a lasting impression that lobbying was

corrupt and unashamed, that lobbyists were disre-

spectful of those with less power, and that govern-

ment relations equated to corporate plundering.

Most fundamentally, Obama sees his stepfather’s

lobbying as a source of conflict and a cause of un-

happiness for his mother. It is not too implausible

to speculate that the 8-year-old Obama may have

felt helpless to comfort his mother in the face of this

evil and even internalized the idea that lobbying

was hateful and wicked. If a child subject to such

emotional conditioning grows up to become a poli-

tician dependent to some extent on lobbyists, might

he or she exhibit a confused and conflicted relation-

ship with the lobbying industry? Does Obama’s

early experience of lobbyists continue to inform his

perception of them collectively?

COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

An importantfeature of Barack Obama’sbiography—

which later resonated with his presidential campaign

philosophy—was his period working as a commu-

nity organizer. For 3 months in 1984, he worked at

the New York Public Interest Research Group (a non-

profit group inspired by Ralph Nader), mobilizing

student volunteers based at City College in Harlem.

Obama wrote in his firstbookthathe‘spent three

months ... trying to convince the minority students

at City College about the importance of recycling’

(Obama, 2008a: 139), but in his second volume, he

mentioned a much greater level of political engage-

ment when he refers to a campaign he directed by

which student leaders would ‘round up petitions

opposing the cuts [in student aid funding proposed

by President Reagan] and then deliver them to the

New York congressional delegation’on a trip to

Washington (Obama, 2008b: 43). This makes it clear

that Obama was lobbying Members of Congress. In

June 1985, Obama moved to Chicago as director of

the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a com-

munity association centered around churches in the

city’s South Side (Maraniss, 2012). He remainedthere

until May 1988. In his first volume of memoirs,

Obama relates how he met ‘Marty Kaufman’,a

Chicago activist looking to hire a Black organizer to

work with church congregations on a scheme to

develop employment. ‘Marty Kaufman’was actually

Jerry Kellman, leader of the Calumet Community

Religious Conference (CCRC), who campaigned about

unemployment in the Chicago suburbs. When CCRC

decided to expand its work closer to the Chicago inner

city, specifically into the Altgeld Gardens housing

project with its predominantly Black population, the

DCP was developed as a spin-off group, which

needed Black leadership (York, 2008; Davidson, 2009).

On Obama’s third day at his new job in Chicago,

he and Kellman discussed how to empower ordi-

nary people to (in Kellman’s words) ‘start going

after the real enemy... The investment bankers.

The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists’(Obama,

2008a: 150). However, in his memoirs, Obama men-

tioned a number of activities he organized and

2

Indeed, the most thoroughly researched account of Obama’s

pre-politics life does not even mention that Lolo Soetoro was a

lobbyist, merely mentioning in one line that he secured ‘a

midlevel executive position with Union Oil’s subsidiary in

Jakarta’(Maraniss, 2012: 231).

Barack Obama on lobbying and lobbyists 309

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Public Affairs 13, 308–328 (2013)

DOI: 10.1002/pa