Well thank you, thank you very much, John, for your kind remarks. It is true that I screwed up the campaign in ’08. Just think; Senator McCain would not be here at this dinner tonight if it weren’t for me. But not for the reason you think. Because if it wasn’t for me being involved in his campaign he would be starting his second term as president and be too busy at the White House to be at the dinner tonight. I do appreciate the remarks and John, I want to particularly thank you for those dozens of earmarks you obtained for my clients over the years.
Don’t believe it when people tell you that John’s hard to lobby. In the last several years he’s only thrown two of my clients out of his office and only thrown me out once. So try him out, he’ll listen. Everyone knows this man’s history, his heroic military service to our country, his superlative public service in the House and the Senate, his role as the guardian of our national security. Judy and I can vouch for one other thing: you cannot have better friends than John and Cindy McCain. There are no more loyal, gracious, generous and fun friends to have than John and Cindy. And I’m sorry Cindy’s not here because she’s also 95% of that team. John, thank you very much, I’m very grateful. A few quick acknowledgements: I know the late, great Jack Valenti received this award a few years ago. Jack brought some of his friends from Hollywood to the dinner. So did I. Would my friends from Hollywood please stand. This is very surprising; Mitt Romney promised me that Clint Eastwood would be at this dinner tonight. It’s a pleasure to be here with Senator Mark Warner–a friend, my senior senator in Virginia. He’s the political champion of Virginia as well as one of the most qualified people in government, as you saw in the video, to understand and practice successful business-government relations to help grow our economy. That’s what we’re trying to do with our business-government relations. Congratulations to you, Senator, on the award.
Senator Jerry Moran, thank you for being here tonight in support of Senator Warner and thank you for your leadership at the NRSC. We greatly appreciate that. Juanita Dugan, foundation chairman and long-time friend, thank you for honoring me in your remarks. Juanita called me several months ago to tell me I was going to get this award. I was obviously very flattered but I said, “Juanita, there will be at least a hundred people in that room at that dinner that are as well-qualified as me to get the award.” She said, “Yeah, I know but we went on seniority.”
Matt Shay, thank you my friend and client for chairing this dinner and doing such a marvelous job in getting all these people here. Linda, your continued excellence in stewarding the Harlow Foundation as president–thank you very much. I’d like to acknowledge the support, the great support that the Harlow family has given to the foundation over the years. They’ve already been recognized, but I thank my friend and former partner, Larry Harlow and his son Bryce who is the next superstar in the Harlow family. Where I come from in North Carolina we say, “If you see a turtle on a stump, he didn’t get there by himself.” Well, anything I might have achieved is only as a part of two great teams. You’ve already heard about one of them, but I also must acknowledge the other 90% of the Black family team, Judy Black. Thank you, honey, for all the support you’ve given me.
I’m very pleased that my son, Wes, and his wife Susan are with us tonight. They’re here tonight celebrating their 8th wedding anniversary, by the way. Thanks to my friends in the video, especially Chairman Jeb Hansarling for taking the time to do the video. The other team that has supported me for almost 30 years is the bipartisan group of great government relations professionals at Prime Policy Group and our predecessor firms. You can’t lead a team if you don’t have a fabulous team and a number of them are here tonight. Would the Prime Policy people stand for just a minute, please, and be recognized.
You saw standing there, Scott Pastrick, the CEO of Prime Policy, one of my closest friends, a great partner. Any success our firm has had is due to Scott’s efforts at least as much as mine. He’s a wonderful friend and partner even though he is a democrat. He’s a good democrat–a Clinton democrat. Actually a Mark Warner democrat is what Scott is. But thank you, my friend, for all these years of working with me and for helping to make our firm a success. Lastly, thanks to all the many, many clients that over the years have allowed us to give themselves without the clients, obviously, you can’t succeed in government relations. I’m grateful to them.
The Bryce Harlow Foundation honors the greatest man ever to practice our profession. Bryce Harlow proved that you don’t have to be an elected official to make a big difference in public policy or in the direction of the government. Bryce spent the majority of his time mentoring and advising others as anonymously as he could. It was said of him that in a room this size, full of people, almost every one of them had received advice from Bryce Harlow and none of them knew it about the others. Bryce’s lessons about how to lobby, how to assist public officials and how to live are known to many of us here tonight. But these lessons are particularly important to the Bryce-Harlow Fellows here in the room. I congratulate you and salute you on becoming Fellows and doing the hard work to learn the government-relations trade academically and from the wonderful mentors that you see around you tonight. If you follow Bryce’s principles, one of you will one night stand on this podium and receive this award.
Bryce Harlow listed six characteristics that a lobbyist must have to be effective: Integrity, willingness to work hard, adaptability to change, humility and perspective, and understanding of the processes of government and the ability to assimilate details. Let me dwell on one of these characteristics for a moment because I think it is the hardest one to achieve. Humility: Bryce Harlow said a Washington representative needs to recognize and accept the fact that whatever it is he represents is much more important to the political animals in town than his own personality and atmospherics. A good politician looks right behind the beseecher. He wants to know, and is busy calculating, as the representative makes his pitch, how the representative’s company and its employees might help or hurt him in his never-ending fight for political survival. In other words, it’s not about you. It’s about your company, your industry, your client, the thousands of employees and potential employees and consumers that you represent. Understate your role and lift up your client; lift up your business.
Now, humility, in all your professional dealings even more than Bryce highlighted, is treating everyone – members, staff, colleagues – with respect and kindness and listening with an open mind. As good a trait as humility is, the opposite trait can ruin you. C.S. Lewis, the great British author of the last century said, “There is one vice of which no one in the world is free, which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else, and of which hardly any people ever imagine that are guilty of themselves. There’s no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking about is pride or self-conceit. And the virtue opposite to it is called humility.” Lewis goes on to say that to avoid pride means don’t snub people, shove your oar in them, patronize them, or show off.
There’s no place in the world where pride trumps humility more often than here in Washington D.C. We all have pride and we all show off sometimes. But if we’re aware of the need to tone it down and to try to be humble, we can do better. We have role models like Bryce Harlow to follow. You know humility is not just a virtue; it will make you more effective in your career and in life. Congratulations, Bryce Harlow Fellows. Thanks to the board of the Bryce Harlow Foundation. Thank you for this great honor. Thank you, John McCain. God bless Bryce Harlow and this great foundation. Thank you very much.