Overseas Americans Week

By Andy Coyne

The Wrap-Up.

Finally, Overseas Americans Week is over and I'm back in Paris eating pain au chocolate and getting over jetlag just in time for spring break.

For anyone interested in following my crazy whirlwind weeklong adventure in lobbying, I thought I'd walk you through what Overseas Americans Week is like. It mostly consists of running from one office to another talking to staffers, which we do for about ten hours straight, five days in a row.  I'm ready for a little vacation.

We started each day at 7:30 or 8:00 am with a planning meeting in the cafeteria beneath the Longworth House Office Building. Then we headed off to a day full of meetings, which generally started on the hour every hour, with between four and eight meetings being conducted by OAW delegation members simultaneously all over the Hill.

In each meeting, the basic idea was to explain our three main issues (voting, tax and Caucus) and make it clear exactly what we were asking for (support our voting legislation, support our tax legislation and join the Americans Abroad Caucus). In so doing, we tried to stick to consistent messages on each, which we agreed upon in advance. On voting, the basic issue is one of equality (i.e., we want to be able to vote as readily as Americans living in the U.S.); on tax, our issue is economic development and jobs back home (i.e., taxing overseas citizens makes it difficult for American companies to send people out in the world to open up new markets, which is bad for business and ultimately affects jobs back home); and on the Caucus, our message is that we are constituents who need a voice (i.e., since our votes are spread out across all 50 states and all 435 Congressional districts, we don't have effective representation on the Hill and need them to join the Caucus to give us that representation).

A lot of people are curious to know what sort of reception we receive in these meetings. There was one meeting this year where we received a reaction at the extreme positive end of the spectrum. As the OAWers entered the meeting, the staffer told them, through a huge smile, that she would soon be an overseas American herself. She had just been accepted to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She said that when she received our meeting request to discuss issues affecting overseas Americans, she took it as a sign of "the will of God." Wow, that's a good reaction. I wasn't in that particular meeting, so the best reaction I've ever gotten is a glowing reference to one of our supporters in Congress. I am frequently told that the person is thrilled to talk to us because they love Congressman Joe Wilson, who co-chairs the Americans Abroad Caucus and represents my hometown of Hilton Head. But I'm sure Congressman Wilson would agree with me that attributing our visit to the will of God is several big steps up in terms of name-dropping.

The only negative reaction I received this year was during one of the first few meetings I did on Monday with James Kigin, who is new to OAW this year and was getting his first taste of lobbying. We sat down in the meeting, started our explanation of the voting issue and were immediately interrupted with, "well, just to play the devil's advocate..." We then spent half an hour getting "well, just to play the devil's advocate..." on each and every one of our issues. She hit us with so many devil's advocate arguments that she left me wondering, does the devil really need an advocate? And if he does, does that advocate have to be in my meeting? As we left, James turned over the notetaker's sheet and pointed at the line where we had to circle one word for an overall indication of the reaction we received: negative, neutral, positive, strong or champion. James looked at me and said something to the effect of, "is negative a strong enough word for her?" to which I suggested that, actually, we just might have to create a new category. After all, she advocated for the devil throughout the whole meeting. So we had one meeting with a staffer name-dropping God and another with a staffer name-dropping the devil. I didn't see either of those coming.

Some people have asked me a lot of questions about who we actually meet with when we go into these offices. On rare occasions, we meet with a Representative or a Senator. Thanks to James, who is a constituent, he and I met with Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota, as part of a weekly reception that she holds for Minnesotans. And I shook hands with probably eight or ten Representatives during the week, although in each of those cases the meeting itself was actually handled by the staffers. In most cases, this is fine, since the staffers tend to be extremely competent and specialized in the areas we are concerned about. This is particularly the case for tax, where there is always one particular staffer who handles taxation issues.

Sometimes it's hard to figure out even who the right staffer is, though. One OAWer this week called for a last minute meeting with the voting staffer in a particular office. The receptionist said, "oh, uh, ok, I guess that would be the forestry and natural resources staffer, right?" "What's natural resources have to do with voting?" the OAWer asked. "Oh! I thought you said boating!"

In a few cases, you just take what you can get and hope for the best. We occasionally meet with the Chief of Staff or the Legislative Director, but generally meet with a Legislative Assistant handing foreign affairs. LAs are usually very competent, interested and helpful, but you do occasionally get someone else and feel as though you've been stuck with the bottom-feeder in the office; not the high-level, mid-level or even low-level staffer specialized in your issue, but instead the chimp-level staffer who generally has a lot in common with our species, but somehow lingers just below our level on the hierarchy of primates. Don't get too discouraged by this, though: I had this happen in maybe five of my fifty or so meetings and I had the opposite extreme of competence in far more meetings.

So when you notice that your staffer is only speaking in grunts, spends most of the meeting picking at fleas and ticks and gazes rapaciously at the plastic fruit on the table, you just say, as gently as possible, "could you pass along our materials to someone who knows how to . . . read?" If he or she smiles and nods, then the Goals sheet just might make its way up a level to a legislative correspondent or a deputy-adjunct-legislation-assistant's aide. Or it could just get to another chimp. You never know.

One final note about our meetings - at least a few times during each OAW, we have unscheduled encounters with staffers and Members in the most unexpected of situations. On Thursday, James Kigin and I were walking across the Cannon House Office Building and bumped into Congressman Joe Wilson and his staffer Paul Callahan. Paul is a friend of mine and is our liaison to Joe for all issues involving the Caucus. Paul told us that he and Congressman Wilson were about to receive the Vice President of Afghanistan as he arrived on Capitol Hill. He invited us to join them, so there we were five minutes later, with Congressman Wilson and the Vice President of Afghanistan, who spoke only Farsi and therefore had an interpreter by his side. I never would have thought that my schedule that day was going to include greeting and having my photo taken with a foreign leader, but interesting things happen on Capitol Hill.

Overseas Americans Week is always an uphill battle (please don't miss my puns, folks; up-Hill, get it?) because even though we are 7 million strong our issues are not at the top of the national priority list. We have to be here every year making our presence felt and our voices heard just to stay as far from the bottom as we can.

Overall, I think that we had a very successful week, although we'll know for certain in coming weeks and months as we see how many new members we have on the Americans Abroad Caucus and how much support we get on our voting and tax legislation. Keep your collective fingers crossed. If you're among the 7 million overseas Americans, then remember that we have a lot of fingers to cross, so don't forget to do your part.

For more information, photos and stories from Andy Coyne and his twenty Overseas Americans Week cohorts, visit www.aaro-oaw.org.