Newtown: Victims turn lobbyists

When a lobbyist for families of Newtown shooting victims called the office of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to set up a meeting, the first response was a standard D.C. offer. They could get a meeting with her staff, and Collins would stop by, they were told.

The families’ answer: not good enough. According to their lobbyists, the families have a rule against staff-only meetings: They won’t do them. They insist on sitting down with the senators themselves. The families wound up getting more than 15 minutes with Collins.


That rule is just one of the ways that the Newtown families, political novices just a few months ago, are proving to be savvy, effective advocates as they promote the gun legislation that has finally begun to move through the Senate. The families are well-educated, and many are well-off. They have been polished and sharp on TV. They’re mostly non-political, but quite accomplished in their own fields. With access to money and media, they’re using persistence, visibility — and, most all, their unique moral authority — to help prod Senate action. They also have their own lobbyists — several of them, in fact.

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They don’t try to sound like wonks or pundits or operatives. They just tell their heart-breaking stories, weaving in a demand for action that is respectful but forceful. As a result, senators respond to them as bereaved parents, not advocates.

“These are smart, articulate people, who don’t have a scintilla of Washington about them,” said Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, which has been helping the families navigate D.C. “But they virtually cannot be denied a meeting. There are not many groups of people that can get a meeting with any senator they want, whenever they want.”

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What started as a support group is now a lobbying force unlike any other to descend on Capitol Hill. The family members typically begin their pitch to senators softly, telling the story of the child that they lost. They gently say they could not have imagined themselves in this position, but they’re doing it to honor the memory of their children. They say they’re supporters of the Second Amendment, and just want to have a conversation.

But there’s nothing subtle about the way some of them conclude their visits: by leaving behind a color card with a photo of their slain relative. Nicole Hockley, who introduced President Barack Obama in Hartford this week, hands senators a card with three photos of her son Dylan, who was 6 when he was gunned down. One frame shows him grinning, in a Superman shirt.

“Dylan Hockley, 3/8/06 – 12/14/12,” the card says. “Honor his life. Stand with us for change. NOW IS THE TIME.”

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Nicole Hockley, who had worked in marketing and communications before becoming a stay-at-home mother of two, told us: “We are there as their voices. But they have a presence in the meeting with these photo cards.” She was among the parents who accompanied Obama back to Washington on Air Force One, but the circumstances made the ride hard to enjoy. “I would rather have been at home with my two boys,” she said.

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A group of experienced operators is guiding these families — to a degree that has irritated some pro-gun Republicans. An uber-strategist for the families is Ricki Seidman, a familiar face at the top levels of Democratic politics ever since she ran the Clinton-Gore campaign’s famous 1992 war room. Seidman, a senior principal with TSD Communications, was Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director during the 2008 general election, and helped the White House win confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotmayor.

Bennett’s Third Way connected the families with a lobbying firm, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, that set up more than 25 Hill meetings this week alone. And Lara Bergthold, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns now with Griffin, Schein in Los Angeles, is helping to manage the media onslaught.

The lobbying for about 15 families is being coordinated by Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit started in Newtown by community members. A smaller number of families is working separately with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which has a harder edge than the Sandy Hook group. People working with the mayor’s group are more likely to say a relative was “murdered” than to say they were “lost.” The mayor’s group is pushing for a ban on assault weapons, while Sandy Hook Promise — which has a focus on mental health in addition to gun safety — has stopped short of that.

Seidman traveled to Edmond Town Hall in Newtown when seven of the families sat down with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” for a moving double segment last week, in which the relatives made the case for tougher gun laws. Faced with a flood of interview requests, Seidman felt comfortable going with Pelley because of the sensitivity of a piece he had done on the launch of Sandy Hook Promise as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”

The families’ growing Washington finesse showed when Pelley asked Nelba Márquez-Greene — whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana, was lost in the shooting — whether she wanted to ban assault weapons. “At first, that was where my heart was,” she said. “I have since learned that it’s a more complex issue. … We’re looking for real change and common-sense solutions, not things that just sound good.”

Veteran Washington handlers say that this group of victims has coalesced and bonded in a way that victims of other mass tragedies have not.

“They first were incredulous when they were told what was and wasn’t possible, but they have become sophisticated about it very quickly,” said Third Way’s Bennett, wearing a green Sandy Hook wristband. “They are now experiencing — and understanding — the contours of the irrationality of the gun debate.”

The families coordinate their visits to the Hill through meetings in their kitchens, on conference calls and over email. The trips are paid for through donations to Sandy Hook Promise.

Many of the victims’ families made pilgrimages to Harford that helped win passage of a tough new Connecticut gun law that Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) signed last week. That became a dry run for the Washington push. In a technique they might replicate in Washington, the parents lined up along the entrance of the Connecticut chamber, so the last thing politicians saw before voting was the anguish in their faces.

Among the survivors on Capitol Hill this week was Jillian Soto, 24, whose big sister, Victoria Soto, 27, was a first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who was killed in the rampage.

“This is now part of my day-to-day life, and it is a full-time job to me and my family,” Jillian Soto said. “To be honest with you, I still don’t know how the mechanics in Washington work. I still find it absurd that senators can even say my sister wasn’t murdered with an assault rifle. She was shot multiple times in front of her kids, and that’s not OK to me. It’s not OK to most Americans.” (As her raw language indicates, Soto is working with Bloomberg’s group.)

Her 15-year-old brother, Carlos Matthew Soto, a high school sophomore, has been writing letters, and getting his friends to do the same. Jillian Soto said she knows the first round of legislation won’t go nearly as far as she wants. But she and other survivors said they plan to fight on. “We have people listening to us,” she said. “Now we have these bills and amendments that are coming into play because we have not given up. It’s a process, but it will eventually happen for us.”

The relatives will be on Capitol Hill again in coming weeks, meeting with senators.

Tim Makris, a father of a fourth-grader who survived the rampage, has quit his product development job to become the executive director of Sandy Hook Promise.

“We don’t go in and pound the table,” he told us. “We spent many weeks studying these issues, so we’d really know what we’re talking about. We know this is a marathon. It took our country a long time to get where we were on 12/14. And it’s going to take a long time to change.”