Chapman Students Learn the Fine Art of Political Schmoozing

It’s not about smoky back-room deals and you don’t have to be a Washington fat cat to get a piece of the action. But it does help to know people in high places.

That was the lesson for 28 mid-career business executives pursuing their masters in business administration from Chapman University, who came to the nation’s capital this week to learn how to lobby. And that’s what they did, schmoozing with politicians, discussing the details with bureaucrats and enlisting the aid of trade groups.

“It just struck us that it would be a fairly important skill and one that would be difficult to get across in a classroom,” said Thomas Turk, a management professor at Chapman University, explaining why he decided to take students on the weeklong field trip. “This struck us as one area where actually getting out there and getting through the maze of who they have to talk to would be an important one.”

Along with the lobbying, the students met with prominent area politicians, such as Rep. Chris Cox (R-Newport Beach), who as head of the Republican Policy Committee sets the agenda for the GOP. They also met with two Chapman alumni, Reps. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and David Bonior (D-Michigan), the second highest ranking Democrat in the House.

Upon arrival, the students were divided into groups and selected lobbying issues to tackle.

Some issues related to students’ work. Chris Pribus works for an Irvine company that helps companies comply with a specific environmental regulation by using recyclable packaging. His mission: Keep that regulation on the books--or his company could lose out.

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So he visited the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture to extol the virtues of the environmental regulation. While most federal workers were helpful, he said he was surprised at how hard it was to get an audience with anyone in power.

Mitzi Sundberg, a golf pro from Laguna Beach, and Ellen Gordon, a manager at a Costa Mesa company, were assigned to lobby against something called the “False Claims Act.”

Under that law, they said, the U.S. Justice Department could demand reimbursement from hospitals for allegedly fraudulent billing, without actually having proof that a hospital committed fraud. Small clinics that can’t afford to fight the government could easily be bankrupted under the act, they said.

“We tried to figure out why something that we felt was so obvious [a remedy] was so difficult” to get passed, said Sundberg.

Students met with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and with the general council for the National Republican Senate Committee. But first, they went to a hospital association to get pointers on how best to approach the lawmakers.

Students also visited think tanks and toured the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to “give them a chance to see what large, useless bureaucracies do,” said Turk.

For the students, who are all at the end of their two-year program, the week gave them an insight into politics and how things really work in Washington.

What surprised them most of all: People listened.

“What I learned was you actually can talk to these people and they will listen to you and you can get things changed,” said Sundberg.