Small Business Investing In Politics

It is a rare Washington convention that draws all but one of the Republican presidential candidates. It is even rarer when their appearances aren’t even the highlight of the gathering.

That was what happened late in October when the National Federation of Independent Business held a three-day “political involvement” program for some 300 of its members from around the country. The session dramatized what has become one of the most important, if unheralded, political stories of the 1990s - the emergence of small business as a growing force in grass-roots politics.

NFIB always has had lobbying clout, in large part because its 600,000 members are widely dispersed, averaging slightly over 1,000 in each congressional district. But as NFIB President Jack Faris acknowledges, it was not until the Clinton administration health care plan emerged in 1993 that NFIB really was able to mobilize a membership too busy to work after-hours in political campaigns.

The Clinton proposal to require every company to buy health insurance for its employees got the small-business owners off their duffs. The Main Street pressures generated by NFIB were given a big share of the credit - or blame - for stopping the Clinton plan dead.

But that was just the start. Faris brought into the NFIB one of the best organizers in the GOP galaxy, R. Marc Nuttle, an Oklahoma lawyer who had worked in the Reagan and Bush campaigns, managed Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidential nomination and directed fund raising and strategy for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Nuttle told me that it was not long after he began consulting for NFIB that he realized that “small business had even more residual political power than the Christian conservatives - and didn’t realize it.”

He hired a pollster to ask a question omitted in the standard political surveys, which classify people by age, income, education, religion and ask if they are in labor union households. The question: Does someone in your household own or work in a small business? Nuttle was astonished to discover that 42 percent of those polled said yes.

But were they a potential voting bloc? “What we found,” Nuttle said, “was that more than half our work force is in small business, and eight out of 10 firms have six employees or less. Then we found out that, on average, more than two of those employees are family members.”

They share the boss’ economic interests and, most often, the same conservative values. Nuttle ticked them off: “Freedom, self-respect, independence, family security, a sense of accomplishment - and control over my own affairs.” That makes them, instinctively, anti-big government, anti-regulation, and, though Nuttle and Faris didn’t say so, anti-union.

The survey turned up one other significant fact. The general public thinks of small business as a custodian of community interest. Seeing the Main Street proprietors often take the lead in charitable and public-spirited enterprises, 65 percent of those surveyed said that small business’ endorsement of a candidate would make them more likely to give that candidate their vote.

In 1994, NFIB got more heavily involved in endorsing candidates than ever before and - in that conservative year - racked up its best-ever percentage of winners.

But the goal was and is more ambitious - to get many more small-business owners into government. And again, 1994 was a breakthrough year. While lawyers still dominate Congress, the freshman class of 1994 numbered 64 men and women from business or banking vs. 37 barristers.

Among the first bills to emerge from this Congress were measures restoring the deductibility of health insurance premiums paid by the selfemployed and the Paperwork Simplification Act for regulatory relief.

Before it’s over, Faris said, NFIB expects to see tax reductions for its members and budget cuts that, as one NFIB lobbyist put it, “radically change” the three federal agencies its members dislike most - the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But they want more. The Washington meeting was a training session for NFIB members who want to get into campaigns. The “breakout sessions” on running for office drew 83 participants - among them two declared candidates for the Senate and a dozen running for the House.

The how-to-run-your-campaign sessions were so intense, Nuttle said, “we almost had to drag people out to hear the presidential candidates.”

Small business is getting big-time into politics, pursuing its own agenda without the stigma of being labeled a special-interest group and giving the GOP an ally the Democrats can only envy.

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