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It’s not true that Tom Daniel has been lobbying on behalf of the state’s public colleges since shortly after Oglethorpe stepped onto Georgia soil, but it’s not far off if you listen to the Capitol crowd.
Daniel started his political career more than 40 years ago, before he’d graduated from UGA, volunteering for George Busbee’s gubernatorial election. He hasn’t missed a General Assembly session, save one, since then.
His office a block from the Capitol is littered with countless mementos and photos. His desk is surrounded by mini-skyscrapers of paper, a shrine to what a state lobbyist’s workplace looked like before email, smart phones, iPads and instant messaging became the common tools of the influence trade.
After 40 plus years, the bony, courtly Hogansville, Ga., native with a steel trap mind for detail who lives off of cheese and peanut butter crackers at times during General Assembly sessions is calling it quits.
There’s usually nothing special about a longtime lobbyist serving out the last days of his last General Assembly session. It’s happened before and will happen again. Another third-floor Capitol veteran, respected convenience store lobbyist Jim Tudor, is retiring as well this year.
But along with Daniel goes decades of institutional knowledge about the inner workings of a system that has more than doubled in enrollment and more than tripled in budget since he began representing it at the General Assembly.
And maybe more remarkable considering the sometimes cutthroat world he’s worked in, Daniel leaves being regarded as one of the good guys of the Capitol, so well liked that the General Assembly plans to honor him on Monday, a rare sending off for a lobbyist.
Lawmakers euphemistically refer to lobbyists as “our friends in the hall.”
In Daniel’s case, they probably mean it.
“He’s such a good friend, when we go out to eat, I buy his meal,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Hill, R-Reidsville.
Anybody who knows anything about the Capitol knows it’s almost always the other way around.
“He’s a throw back to the old days when relationships were everything,” said Hill. “He will tell you what you need to know at the time you need to know it.”
Abit Massey, a legendary poultry industry lobbyist who started at the Capitol in 1961, said of Daniel, “He’s a gentleman and he does his home work. You can set your watch by what he tells you. He’s really going to be missed.”
Lobbyists are often seen as the bad guys and gals of the statehouse. They get paid to tell lawmakers how legislation effects their client, sometimes writing bills that favor their patrons, somethings working against the bills of the competition. They take the committee handling their bills out to Bone’s in Buckhead for a fancy dinner with steaks and fine wine, and they buy back-benchers cups of weak coffee as they hunt for votes. Over the summer, they invite key legislators to resorts for their clients’ conventions, a nice week on the beach or the golf course.
University System lobbyists are among the big-spenders of that world, largely because they hand out tickets to University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State or Georgia Southern football games. When the General Assembly is not in session, the lobbyists work hard to make sure local lawmakers get to see and hear about how the $2 billion they allocate to colleges each year is spent.
Daniel was finishing his political science degree at UGA in 1974 when he volunteered to work on Busbee’s campaign. After graduating, his wife Lynn, a special education major, got a job in Atlanta. Daniel said he badgered Busbee’s team into putting him on the payroll, where he went to work as a “runner,” fetching stamps, stuffing envelopes and doing whatever the campaign needed.
Busbee’s main competitor in the race was former Gov. Lester Maddox, and Daniel spent the weeks leading up to the primary on the road with Busbee, helping him prepare for stops in one small town after another. It was a heady time for the new graduate and he wanted to stay on the road, but once the Maddox and Busbee wound up in a three-week Democratic primary runoff race, campaign officials told Daniel he was needed back at the office.
“That was an important lesson that still shapes me today,” Daniel said. “It wasn’t about me, it was about what was best for the campaign, what was best for the organization, what was best for the undertaking.”
Busbee won the election, and Daniel was hired to vet potential board and commission appointments, a job that put him in contact with some of the most important business people in the state.
He also learned a vital lesson from Busbee. The third floor of the Capitol is typically abuzz with rumors and political intrigue, but Daniel is known for not having an unkind word to say about anyone.
Once, while working for Busbee, Daniel was “fussing” about a lawmaker who wasn’t helping the governor on some legislation.
“He (Busbee) pulled me aside and said, ‘It takes 91 votes to pass a bill in the House.’ What he was saying is, don’t burn any bridges, learn how to disagree without being disagreeable,” Daniel said.
After working to get Busbee re-elected in 1978, he served with the governor until then-House Appropriations Chairman Joe Frank Harris decided to run for governor. Daniel knew and worked with Harris and admired him, and he worked on his campaign in 1981 and 1982. He missed the 1982 session while working on the campaign. He hasn’t missed one since.
Once Harris won, he got Daniel hired on at the University System, which needed somebody to translate to lawmakers — and the administration — what it was doing. He also worked to get a new formula for funding the system up and running.
Harris said Daniel was the perfect choice for the job.
“He’s smart and he has a great memory,” Harris said. “He probably visited every legislator. He knows their hot button, he knows how to appease them and not offend them.
“Each session you’d have some hot issue, from funding to guns on campus. You really need somebody to tote the water and, if necessary, use that water to put out the fires.”
Since hiring on, he’s been a fixture at statehouse budget and higher education meetings, serving as the voice of the system to governors and lawmakers who, for the most part, have been receptive.
Sen. Hill remembers getting to know Daniel in the early 1990s, when the state was in cutback mode. Gov. Zell Miller and lawmakers didn’t want to add projects such as dorms and parking lots to the annual bond package. Hill was a new lawmaker trying to get a project for his local school, Georgia Southern, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. Then legislative committee members asked Daniel about it. “It was like E.F. Hutton,” Hill said. “When they questioned him, he explained it so well they couldn’t do anything but agree to put it in the budget.”
Harris’ former chief of staff Tommy Lewis, a lobbyist for Georgia State University, remembers a more recent fight, the battle to limit guns on college campuses. In 2013, the “campus carry” bill was being negotiated on the final day of the session. Daniel, as a senior vice chancellor of the system, led a pack of public college lobbyists outside the state Senate as the final seconds of the session tick away, hoping to run out the clock on a bill the Board of Regents considered dangerous. Daniel and his crew were pulling lawmakers from the chamber, working on them to make sure the bill didn’t get a last-second vote. It never did and died with the session.
He said Daniel kept his cool, as he always does. “He never loses his temper,” Lewis said. “His bedside manner, his demeanor is second to none.”
And unlike most people at the Capitol, a den of gregarious politicians, lobbyists and journalists, Daniel remains self-effacing, humble about what where he’s come from, and what he’s been a part of. He doesn’t take anything for granted, still writing hand-written thank you notes to people.
“My college education was of great benefit to me,” he said. “To be able to work for the University System and to have a small role in giving other people that opportunity was always really exciting to me.”
Most days during the session he can be found walking the halls weighed down by an accordion folder overflowing with reports, memos and data, or hanging around outside of the third-floor budget room. He and his fellow Regents lobbyists are so much a part of the furniture of the statehouse that one section of an appropriations conference room was long ago dubbed “Regents Row” because that’s where they would camp out during budget negotiations.
During the session, work weeks can last 60-70 hours. Daniel’s wife, Lynn, said important life decisions are put off during those three months. Some days he takes a sleeping bag to his office in case he needs to stay overnight. “I have got the power of attorney so I make all the decisions,” she said.
Of his retirement, she said, “I am not happy, I am looking for the sympathy cards to come rolling in. I have told him he has to go to work, he needs to do something. I am in charge of my life.”
Daniel said his wife quipped that she married him “for better or worse, but not for lunch.”
His only plans right now are to work on his golf game and spend more time with his son’s family in the Washington, D.C., area.
Leaving the Capitol is often difficult for politicians and lobbyists. Statehouse politics gets in their blood. Lawmakers frequently come back as lobbyists. Lobbyists come back as contract lobbyists, getting paid only to work the session, instead of the whole year.
But Daniel said, “It’s time. It’s a young man’s game. You have to have a lot of stamina to do this.”
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