Political Efficiency

I ran into a brief interesting piece on Pharmaceutical-Business-Review.com about the efficacy lobbying effort that went on leading up to the House vote on HR 2868. It notes that Socma (sic) Connect targeted some members of Congress with a letter writing campaign to gain their support. Only two targeted members were identified in the piece, Berry (D, AR) and Ross (D, AR), both of whom voted against passage. Apparently the other 19 Democrats who voted against the bill, did so without outside assistance. This means that SOCMA Connect only converted 2 of the needed 21 additional Democrats necessary to defeat HR 2868. Even by baseball stats (batting average of 95) standards this is a very poor political performance. Statistically, given the same performance in the Senate, they will not be able to change enough votes to stop the bill from coming to the floor for a vote, much less stop passage. Perhaps SOCMA needs to concentrate more of their efforts on the amendment process to make specific provisions more workable. This has been the tact taken by the American Chemistry Council. That revision process resulted in changes to the Citizen Suit procedures that still allowed for citizen action without making facilities face the prospect of frivolous law suits.