Christina Mulvihillis the director of government and public affairs at the consumer electronics giant, Sony Electronics USA. It’s a relatively small office for such a large company—just two registered lobbyists—but Sony makes use of hired lobbying firms in addition to its in-house staff. In 2011, Sony Electronics reported total lobbying expenditures of $500,000.

Before coming to Sony in 1998, Mulvihill was special assistant to the US ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). She was the senior legislative assistant to Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) and held several staff positions with members of the House of Representatives, including Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).

Mulvihill holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Sweet Briar College and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins’ Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. At the time of this interview, she was on maternity leave from Sony and managed the interview while simultaneously feeding, burping, and entertaining her two-month-old daughter, Reagan.

Beth Leech: How did you begin your career?

Christina Mulvihill: If we go way back, it probably started when I was very little and I would go with my mother to work the polls during elections. She was very active in local politics. I would always go into the voting booth with her. At home, we would have political discussions at our table. From a very young age, my parents discussed politics and how the government worked with us. I knew the House of Representative and the Senate before it was taught to me in school.

Leech: Where did you grow up?

Mulvihill: I was born and raised in Miami. I lived in Miami until I was twelve. Then we moved to Georgia, and I went to college in Virginia. While I was in college, I came up to Washington to intern like so many people do, but I didn’t work on Capitol Hill. I interned with a trade association that worked on issues related to higher education. Many trade associations have bits and pieces that deal with Capitol Hill, but they also deal with bigger issues that are specific to what their members do.

I knew early on that the sexy jobs and the people that everyone looked up to were the Capitol Hill staffers. Of course, that’s what I wanted to do. So after college I got a job working the front desk in a congressional office, the lowest of the lowly in a House office. When I started, my take-home pay was a little over $400 a month. I couldn’t even make my rent. My parents had to help support me even though I had graduated from college. From there I moved up, and I’ve worked for a lot of different bosses. Jumping from job to job on Capitol Hill is not seen as a bad thing. In the professional world, the downtown world, your longevity with a company is admired, but that is not always true on Capitol Hill.

My first meaty job—beyond fluff work as a Capitol Hill tour guide—was with Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. In the last session, she was chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She just left that recently. I was with her for several years. I was on her personal staff and she took me over to committee, which are two very different experiences on Capitol Hill.

Leech: Could you describe that? How is committee staff different from personal staff?

Mulvihill: When you’re in a personal office of a member of Congress, you’re really dealing with constituent issues. I don’t necessarily mean helping somebody get a Social Security check that never showed up, although that is one function that the office will serve. As personal staff, you deal with policy issues from the perspective of that constituency. On committee staff, you’re dealing with the aggregate-level policy effects. Even though your boss’s position will go into it, the way the system is designed, the responsibility of a committee staffer is to look at the overall policy area and become the subject-matter expert on whatever committee it is. There’s a different focus when you’re personal office versus when you’re on committee.

I left to go to graduate school in Chicago and missed Capitol Hill and politics terribly. After a short while, I came back to Washington and spent a year in the House. Then I decided that, to make my record stand out, I would go to work in the Senate. Capitol Hill staffers usually pick a chamber—either the Senate or the House—and stick with that chamber. I wanted to have both experiences. That’s when I went to work for Senator Mike DeWine from Ohio.

Leech: How long were you there?

Mulvihill: I was with him when he first started in the Senate in 1995. I stayed there for two years. Working the Senate is very different from working in the House. I jokingly say that it’s like moving from the junior varsity side up to the varsity side, because as a staffer, you have so much more responsibility. Senators’ schedules are just so incredibly busy. It was a different experience that I felt fortunate to have.

Leech: There are fewer senators, they’re on more committees, and they have more responsibilities. So do the staff as well?

Mulvihill: Yes. I always advise people who want to work on Capitol Hill that the best way to start off is in the House, because there are few staff members in each office. At some point, your boss will be super busy and will look to see who has the least amount of work at that moment, and give them an interesting responsibility. For example, you might not be the press secretary, you could be a legislative assistant, and your boss has a speech or several speeches to give. If the press secretary is busy, the legislative assistant might get to write the speech. In the House, a staffer gets that broad experience. In the Senate, that would never happen. A staffer’s job in the Senate is very well-defined, and there is less room to move up the ladder.

So I tell people, “Start off in the House. If you like it, if you find you like a certain issue, then you will know where to focus.” In the Senate, a lot of staffers have been there for twenty or more years. They almost have, dare I say, more power than a House member. They wield that kind of power.

Leech: Why do you think that is?

Mulvihill: I think part of it is longevity and that they become the experts. There’s no way that a senator can sit down and read through every bill, know every issue, and negotiate every deal. So that responsibility falls to these staffers who often have a lot of experience. In the House, you have some members who may only be elected for one or two terms, and they just don’t have the pull or experience that a very senior staffer in the Senate has.

Leech: Staffers are more likely to stay longer in the Senate because . . . ?

Mulvihill: It’s a very well-respected position here in Washington. When you’re at a cocktail party and you are the chief of staff to a long-serving Senator, you are viewed as having a lot of power.

Leech: While you were in the Senate, what was your position?

Mulvihill: I was a legislative assistant for DeWine. I did his committee work, although I was not paid by the committee. There was a lot of change happening in the Senate. A lot of the senators at that time were old school. They came from a time period when there were a lot of friendships across party lines, and deals were made based on personal relationships. It’s more contrarian up there right now—there is a lot more infighting. The Senate, historically, never had grenade throwers. In the House, they have always had grenade throwers, these outlier members of Congress who show up and want to stir the pot.

In the Senate things were different because senators would sit down, have a glass of wine together, figure out a bill, and that bill would pass. That was how work was done in the old days. Things slowly have changed, and now things are dramatically different. It was the end of that older era when I was in the Senate.

Leech: Why did you decide to leave?

Mulvihill: I was a little burned-out and I had a great job offer. I left. I’ll tell you, it’s very difficult to leave as a staffer, because you really just get sucked into that lifestyle and it is a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job. I remember my first free weekend after I stopped working in the Senate. I didn’t know what to do—because as a staffer, I would work every weekend. If you walked into my office on a Saturday, it would look like it was a Tuesday afternoon because everyone was there working. I adapted and changed lifestyles, but to this day, when I go up to the Senate, my heart beats a little bit faster because I kind of wish I was back there. How crazy is that?

Leech: When you left the Senate, you worked for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. How did that come about?

Mulvihill: A woman I know became the US ambassador to the OECD. I had a personal relationship with her, and so I became her assistant even though she was of a different party. There are lots of friendships and relationships in Washington that go beyond parties. For instance, I know plenty of Republican women who love and admire Stephanie Cutter—who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager—and vice versa.

Leech: Those sorts of connections are not partisan, which I’m assuming is helpful for you in your job?

Mulvihill: Yes. We sit back and we kind of laugh about it. It’s like that old cartoon with the wolf and the sheepdog clocking in, then fighting, and then at the end of the day, clocking out and going for a drink together. It’s exactly like that.

Leech: What brought you back to Washington?

Mulvihill: I got the opportunity to start Sony’s Washington office. And there are a lot of positives about working for a big-name company here in Washington. I’ve never been denied access to any office. And that is despite the fact that Sony does not have a PAC and we do not give any corporate money. We don’t play the money game at all. That is a separate game that’s played here in DC. Obviously, I’m aware of it, but I’ve never been privy to the access that goes with having one of those huge, multimillion-dollar PACs.

But working for a name company provides its own access, because there are Sony constituents in every congressional district in the country. Everyone knows Sony as a brand. That makes my job a lot easier.

Leech: What skills did you have that allowed you to get that job and to transfer over to the lobbying side?

Mulvihill: The skill set I use today, working at Sony, had to be developed. It didn’t necessarily come with me from Capitol Hill. On Capitol Hill, you learn the process. You learn the flow, but you don’t necessarily have to learn the issues because you’re dealing with so many issues and they change all the time. The issues you deal with are whatever’s currently on the radar screen. I created a PowerPoint presentation to give at Sony to try to explain the Capitol Hill process in business terms, because at Sony, I’m dealing with businessmen. They spend all day with pie charts and graphs. They have no idea how things work on the Hill.

I called it the “public policy life cycle,” because business people are used to dealing with products and products have life cycles. A policy life cycle starts with the media. The media will pick up on something and there will then be public outrage. An example a few years ago was when the story broke about lead in toys coming from China having poisoned some kids. The public was outraged. There were stories on the news every night and in the newspapers. People are following the story and Capitol Hill feels under pressure to react.

Congress does one of two things. Either they ignore the situation completely or they act with a sledgehammer. If it’s the sledgehammer, then the entire time the story is in the news, Capitol Hill staffers are working behind the scenes to put together a congressional hearing to milk the story for more publicity for their boss and/or they are putting together legislation to address the issue. That legislation will pass quickly and really without full due process because they don’t really always vet things. They pass and then later they go back and look at what they’ve done.

In the past few years, Congress has kicked a lot of the practical application of policy to the agencies. As a result, we have to focus on agency rulemaking procedures. The case of the toys went to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Then the focus for the downtown lobbyists moved from Capitol Hill to the various agencies that were regulating. For corporate lobbyists like me, contacting people on Capitol Hill is really about fifteen percent to twenty percent of the job. The bulk of the work is off the Hill now, and possibly further. Some issues might even end up before the Supreme Court.

Leech: Are you dealing with that whole range of issues from all three branches of government?

Mulvihill: Oh, yes, and most corporate lobbyists do unless they work for a big powerhouse of a company. The company would have to have a very sophisticated operation, with fifty to one hundred people in Washington working either as Capitol Hill lobbyists or as specialists to deal with regulation on an everyday basis. They might be specialists in customs laws, or if it’s a telecom company, it will have several Federal Communications Commission specialists on staff. There’s really only a handful of companies that do that. Most companies have one person or one group that deals with everything.

Leech: How big is your office?

Mulvihill: With our assistant, there are three of us. We also hire a lot of outside people, consultants, and lobbying firms.

Leech: What do these lobbying firms that are on retainer for Sony do for the company? What tasks are they put on?

Mulvihill: For a company that doesn’t have access, the lobbying firm will provide access. This is what I always ask people who want to hire a lobby firm. My first question is, “Do you want access?” Meaning, “Do you want access to a certain member, or senator, or leadership?”

Or are you looking for expertise? Sometimes expertise is not an issue because, frankly, companies are full of experts. There’s no one in Washington who is as sophisticated as people outside the Beltway on issues related to what the company actually does. I ask if they need experts on governmental process once the issue leaves the Hill—for example, dealing with a small agency within the Department of Transportation or dealing with the FCC. Different lobby shops will have different experts on staff. Those experts might not know the issue at all, but they’ll know the process.

Leech: Can you walk us through an issue that you’ve worked on relatively recently, explaining how that came on your radar and what steps you had to take along the way to deal with it?

Mulvihill: There are so many. I’m like triage. I see problems come in and I figure out how we solve them as a company. It might not be with me. We might have to hire a special law firm or a special lobby shop. This is happening constantly. The other thing I jokingly say is that I can speak two languages. I can speak Washington and I can speak business. I act as a translator between the two. The people I deal with within Sony are businessmen. They’re in the business of making a product and making profits. They look at people in Washington like we have horns because logic does not often play into how Washington works. The business people are usually very practical, logical people.

The same thing is true for Washington. There are very few people I have ever come across in Washington who truly understand how a business operates. When I make references to things like supply chains, my business guys know exactly what I mean. Capitol Hill has zero idea what I’m talking about. I recently was dealing with a senior staffer from the House Ways and Means Committee, which deals with taxation. That staffer said to me, “I need you to explain to me why we need these Sony jobs.”

I replied, “Really? You need me to sit down and explain why we need jobs for the country?”

This was a staffer who really should understand. This was not some twenty-two-year-old in a first job.

Leech: How did you manage to speak both languages? How did you learn the other language?

Mulvihill: I had to learn corporate as an adult because I went to a liberal arts college and corporate was not taught there. I learned a little in graduate school, when I studied international economics. Working on Capitol Hill, you only learn to speak Washington. It shocks me sometimes how little the two groups are able to communicate. There are few people who really do the translation well.

Leech: What was a recent issue that you worked on?

Mulvihill: One issue that is still going on and will be going on for the next ten years is regulating energy use by consumer electronics products: how, for example, your TV uses energy while it’s on and also while it’s off. That issue started with a few members of Congress and Senators who were lobbied by a nonprofit organization called the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. These members of Congress said, “Hey, you know what? These products are energy vampires and we should regulate them. We should introduce legislation that would limit the amount of kilowatts that a television or any other product could use.” They started with a list and introduced a bill. Our industry had not been heavily regulated, the way the energy and telecom industries are and have been for a long time.

Leech: Consumer electronics not so much?

Mulvihill: Not so much—but on some things, yes. In fact, one exercise I did while at Sony was to look at the number of agencies that regulate the sale of a television. How many agencies do you think have a finger in trying to sell a TV to a consumer?

Leech: I can only think of three possible ones right now. How many is it?

Mulvihill: About twenty.

Leech: Oh, wow.

Mulvihill: Everything from the IRS, which affects how it’s taxed, to agencies that get involved in where products come from and how products interact with one another. There is the Department of Commerce, the National Institute of Standards in Technology, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We also deal with the Department of Transportation, because we have to transport the TVs, and the Department of Agriculture because it regulates the paper on which the warranty and product information are printed. The list goes on. It’s pretty crazy.

After the legislation to regulate energy use by consumer electronics was introduced, the nonprofit organization that raised the issue went to the two major agencies that regulate energy use: the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. At Sony, we did what I’m going to call the “state dance,” because some of the state legislatures started introducing similar legislation.

Then the industry and the trade associations started meeting to figure out “How are we going to address this problem?” Some of the proposed legislation at the state level was very prescriptive. It was going so far as to tell us what the design of the TV was going to be. Of course, that’s what makes a Sony TV different from a Sharp or Mitsubishi. If the government standardized design, obviously that would be a problem for our company. Sony’s philosophy is that the government should not be picking technology winners or losers. In TVs, there is plasma versus LCD versus LED. There are so many different options. We didn’t think the government should come in, and through legislation or regulation, ban one or the other.

Leech: So this issue comes up and all these agencies are involved. What do you as a lobbyist actually have to do?

Mulvihill: My first stop would be going to see staff in the senator’s office or the House member’s office who introduced the bills to explain the issue to them. There’s no way a staffer could possibly understand what one of my internal engineers does. It’s just not possible—even if they have expertise in issue X, whether it is a foreign policy issue or a regulatory issue—that they’re going to know as much as the people who spent their entire careers dealing with that topic. I would start there.

I work a lot with our trade associations, because we don’t have the resources to do it all ourselves. We could have three full-time staffers dealing with this.

Leech: What trade associations are you particularly allied with?

Mulvihill: For us, the Consumer Electronic Association [CEA] is very important. There are a lot of others: the Digital Electronics Group [DEG], the Blu-ray Disc Association, the Renewable Energy Markets Association [REMA], and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]. Each has a different mission. Some, like REMA, do a lot of political activity. Some, like IEEE, are more what I would call “industry associations”—meaning they do certification, and training, and a lot of things other than policy.

The politics and policy part is very small in the CEA. It does the big annual electronics trade show that just happened in Las Vegas. Most of the members of that organization don’t follow or understand the policy part at all. Instead, they are interested in how to install a new car stereo and who is allowed to train the installers at Best Buy. Then, we have other trade associations that really do nothing but focus on Washington. Even within the trade association political world, there can be a big difference with regard to Washington. Some associations are very sophisticated and some are not.

There’s a trade association for every possible group you can think of. I hired a professional organizer to help me organize my baby’s room. There’s an organization of professional organizers.

Leech: Of course there is.

Mulvihill: Somebody should write a funny book about all the different associations and their interests.

Leech: One of my favorites is the National Frozen Pizza Association.

Mulvihill: Trade associations are important politically because they do follow issues and file comments on proposed regulations. One recent regulatory issue that Sony was involved in dealt with the transport of lithium ion batteries. These are the batteries that are in every smartphone. These batteries are everywhere. I remember doing a double-take on one comment filing.

Leech: To clarify, when a regulation is proposed, there is a period in which anyone can formally submit information and comment in support of or against the regulation.

Mulvihill: Yes, and this comment was from the National Association of Funeral Home Directors. I wanted to know why funeral home directors would have an interest in lithium ion batteries and transporting them. It turns out that because the way the rule was written, it affected bodies that had to be transported, because some of them would have pacemakers or other devices with batteries in their bodies.

Leech: And the funeral home trade association was on top of things and realized that.

Mulvihill: It never would have occurred to me that a regulation would apply to a dead person, but it did the way it was drafted. So the funeral home directors had to file comments.

Leech: So, like the funeral directors and the batteries, you would turn to your trade associations for help with the issue of regulation of energy usage in consumer electronics.

Can you talk a little bit more about what happens during the notice and comment period within an agency?

Mulvihill: First, you and/or your attorneys will put together a huge package of comments. Comments can be just a simple typed letter, but more often, there’s an economic impact study, industry statistics, and sometimes a public relations component. It can take months to put together a comment package.

Every agency operates a little differently. As a result, it’s a good idea to hire a lobby shop that has somebody with expertise in that particular agency to help you through the process. Some agencies operate very quickly. They’ll put out a notice of proposed rulemaking, you have to get your comments in within the month, and almost immediately there’s a new rule. In other agencies, it can take years. In yet other agencies, they’ll put together a study group. They’ll look at an issue. They’ll discuss it. The administrative rulemaking process is just so bizarre—I have no other way to describe it. In addition, once a rule has been proposed, you can no longer talk to the agency. The one time you should be talking to them, you’re legally barred from doing so.

Leech: What do you do instead?

Mulvihill: You go see people at the White House. You go to the Office of Management and Budget. They’ll have somebody there who can listen to you, but they can’t do anything. That’s it. If the proposed rule would have an economic impact of over $100 million, then it also would go through an interagency review process.

Leech: Is there anything else you would be doing?

Mulvihill: At the same time, I would be working with people internally to explain what’s happening, what’s been proposed, what the impact would be to our company, and to explore possible solutions. There’s always more than one solution. We run through the list. Businesspeople want to know time frames, cost, and specifics. Here in Washington, people don’t really think in those terms. If an issue lingers on for two or three years, then it lingers on for two or three years.

Leech: What does an average day look like for you when you’re back at the office? How much of your time would you spend on different types of tasks, and what would those different sorts of tasks include?

Mulvihill: Lots of e-mail. That’s really new. In the last couple of years, there have been a lot of media reports on how congressional staffers prefer to be contacted via e-mail rather than meeting because they’re so busy. So I do a lot of e-mailing. I often have several events to attend, although the work is cyclical—so, depending on the congressional schedule, my schedule will be different. It depends on whether Congress is in session.

Leech: What sort of events?

Mulvihill: Fundraisers or meet-and-greets. It depends on the member or senator as to what they have. If they’re senior, they probably going to have an expensive fundraiser in the evening. If they’re not senior, they’re going to have a meet-and-greet in the morning to meet people so that they can raise money.

Leech: You’ll end up going to these despite the fact that Sony doesn’t have a PAC?

Mulvihill: Right. I will give individually to people whom I support personally. It doesn’t necessarily have to benefit Sony. It depends. Of course, we’re at the stage now where a lot of the staffers that I knew when I first went to Capitol Hill are now running for office themselves, so there is a personal relationship to support. You don’t have to support, but obviously if a friend of yours runs for big office, you’re going to go to their fundraiser.

Leech: Okay. We’re walking through your day.

Mulvihill: My days at work usually start at eight a.m. I might go to an eight o’clock meet-and-greet somewhere and then I would go back to the office. I would read the inside-Washington publications: Politico, the National Journal, and Roll Call. If it’s a Monday, I probably have trade-association conference calls in which we plan the week ahead. If it’s during the week when Congress is in session, there would be several hearings that you might want to monitor, watching at your desk on C-SPAN.

Sometimes, for a big hearing, I’ll go up to the Hill. There is a networking component. You really want to physically interact with people, both colleagues from the industry and government officials, when everybody is gathered at one place. It is a chance to establish rapport with colleagues in industry, with the staffers who are there, and the members or senators involved. If it’s a very hot topic, I’ll want to sit there and listen, not just to the statements, but to the questions and answers. I would be looking for things like: How hostile is the member or senator in their questioning? How friendly are they? Are they asking questions that seem appropriate? I remember one congressman who asked the same three questions at every hearing, no matter the topic. He obviously didn’t fully understand the issues.

Then usually there are lunch meetings with trade associations. There are a million different organizations. Obviously, I’m female, and I do a lot of female-in-politics-related events. They have luncheons or afternoon gatherings. I do more e-mails. I’m on a lot of conference calls based on the current issue. I’ll touch base with any outside lobbyist or law firm. I’m always reporting back to the home office in California.

When Congress is in recess and members and senators go back to the district or state, I might set up meetings out there for them. When Sony had a lot of manufacturing in the United States, we’d want them to tour our plants—have them see it in person. We can say we have five hundred jobs in city X, but until a member or senator actually sees it, it doesn’t really have an impact on them. At one point, we had a huge manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania with six thousand employees. I invited one of the two long-serving senators six or seven times a year to visit that plant, and never did he come. We were a huge employer. I was able to get the secretary of the Treasury to come once, but I couldn’t get that senator.

Leech: Okay, we’re in your afternoon now. What else is happening in this day?

Mulvihill: I like networking. I think it’s an important part of the business here. I make up a call list every week and I try to get through to everyone on that list. Usually it’s at least ten people that I want to touch base with, to reach out, find out what’s happening with them, and where they are job-wise, especially after a new Congress is sworn in. You want to just be current on where everybody is.

Then I get ready for the crowd of five o’clock receptions or events. Usually, I have those maybe two nights a week, sometimes three or four. If I really wanted to do an event every night, I absolutely could.

Leech: Are these mostly fundraising events?

Mulvihill: No. They would be group discussions, conferences, and speakers. Some have a huge impact. I either show up just to listen, or I might be participating in some way, shape, or form. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, does events all the time: breakfast, lunch, and evening. There’s no fundraising involved, but they allow me to keep tabs on what the discussion is on a particular policy matter. Some of the evening events are fundraisers, but they tend to be very high-dollar events if they are for dinner. I don’t get that involved with those because we don’t have a PAC.

Leech: Given these evening events, how conducive would you say lobbying is to family life?

Mulvihill: My husband and I are both lobbyists. I think it’s helpful if you’re a lobbyist married to another lobbyist, because you both know you’re going to have a lot of late nights. In fact, I know of marriages that came apart because the lobbyist would be out late and the spouse was waiting at home at six o’clock. That’s hard. I think it can be conducive to family life, but you have to make it that way.

Leech: Right now you are on maternity leave. Is this your first?

Mulvihill: This is number one.

Leech: Congratulations.

Mulvihill: Thank you.

Leech: How long will you remain on leave?

Mulvihill: I’m going to take a really long leave because I know that I only get to do this once. I’m probably going to be out for six months. Three months paid by Sony, three months unpaid as part of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Leech: How old is Reagan now?

Mulvihill: Reagan is two months old yesterday. She’s little. I don’t know a lot of female lobbyists. It can be done but it’s overwhelming right now.

Leech: Especially in the corporate world, I would imagine.

Mulvihill: Especially the corporate world. I deal with electronics and technology, which are heavily male industries to begin with. There are some issues that just attract all women and some just attract all men. For instance, take education. Almost everyone I ever worked with who deals with education policy is female. There are a handful of men.

Leech: How do you adjust or how do you cope with the heavily male aspect of your world?

Mulvihill: I walk in and kind of muscle my way in no matter what. I went to an all-women’s college, and I think that helped me not to care, not to worry. I think it’s very hard for a lot of young women. They’re very intimidated. I tell them, “You’ve got to put that intimidation aside.” If you are the only female in the room, then you just have to work twice as hard. I don’t think the gender imbalance is going to be solved anytime soon. Politics in both parties are male-dominated.

Leech: What other advice do you have for someone who is thinking about getting into policy advocacy and corporate lobbying?

Mulvihill: I tell people that there are three different types of political animals. First, there are people who deal with pure policy. They work in academia, they work in think tanks, and they simply deal with the nonreal world of pure policy. Somebody over at the Cato Institute can sit in his cubicle and dream up how policy should work and write a paper on it.

At the other end of the spectrum there are people who deal with politics. They are in the business of getting people elected. They do fundraising. They do messaging. They do demographics. They get on work cycles based on the election cycle. If they’re in off-cycle, usually there’s a referendum in some city and they go off to work on that. This is like James Carville. These are the political hacks.

In the middle, there are people like me who deal a little with policy and a little with politics. We have to balance the two. We deal with policy but also deal with the real world. But in my world, we have almost no contact with the people in the James Carville basket, and you would never hire somebody from the pure politics world as a lobbyist.

Leech: They wouldn’t be able to get it done.

Mulvihill: Yes, there definitely are three different groups. If somebody tells me that they are interested in politics, I’ll explain my different baskets and ask them which one appeals to them. There are some people who really do love policy, just pure policy. That’s great. I would say, “Go work in the think tank. Don’t become a lobbyist.”

Leech: What is your favorite part of your job?

Mulvihill: For me, it is the person-to-person interaction. I think for a lot of people, some of it becomes a game: Who can win? I think there are other people who are very passionate about their issue and lobbying is their way of giving back to society. It is their public service.

Leech: What do you like least about your job?

Mulvihill: I don’t like the money aspect. I don’t know if I would ever work for a company that had a PAC. Working for Sony, if someone asks me for a contribution, I can say, “We don’t make PAC contributions. We don’t give out any money. If you do something for us, you’re doing it because you’re helping the company and helping create jobs.” To me that is a better reason to act than getting a $2,000 campaign contribution.

Leech: If someone’s dream is to become a corporate lobbyist just like you, what advice would you give them?

Mulvihill: Go to Capitol Hill. That’s the first stop. You have to understand how the system works. It’s nothing you could ever learn in a classroom. You really have to be up there and see how the everyday of Capitol Hill works.

Leech: What in your education or training, besides Capitol Hill, do you think helped you do what you do?

Mulvihill: A lot of politics is instinctual. I don’t think it’s anything you can really learn. I have a friend, a colleague from Capitol Hill, who is very smart. He went to University of Chicago undergrad, University of Chicago for his MBA. He didn’t understand politics. He could read about it and understand it from a historical perspective, but he couldn’t quickly see the ramifications of an issue and which parties it would affect. Capitol Hill just wasn’t the right place for him. I don’t know if it’s anything you could possibly learn. I think it’s just a personality trait.