COLUMN ONE : Phone Frenzy in the Capitol : Special interest groups are using sophisticated electronic networks to generate an astonishing volume of calls to Congress. Such ‘grass-roots’ lobbying is wide open to manipulation.

Almost without letup, the phone calls pour into Ilisa Halpern’s headset as she sits in the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), typing the caller’s name, address and comments onto a computer screen.

From a Sonoma woman upset about President Clinton’s economic plan: “Very definitely not support it. President is pathological liar. Can’t fool all of the people. Tired of listening to all of the rhetoric. Feinstein also a radical.”

From a Los Angeles man with mixed feelings about Clinton initiatives: “Encourage you to pass the plan. Don’t get carried away with weakening defense. Health care is important but don’t lessen the consumer’s choice of M.D.’s.”

After each call, Halpern sends the message to the computer’s memory bank. At the end of the day, the messages--as many as 1,000, which are recorded by up to 10 of Feinstein’s 60 aides--are automatically sorted by issue, printed out and placed on the senator’s desk.

Accompanying the phone calls are a flood of letters, postcards and Mailgrams. In a recent week, Feinstein received 9,000 letters and 50,000 postcards and Mailgrams--far more than her predecessor, John Seymour, ever got in a week.

The outpouring is being duplicated all over Capitol Hill. Senate and House offices are being hit with twice as many calls this year as last--4.2 million vs. 1.9 million in the first month alone, officials say. And mail to lawmakers has soared past 400 million pieces a year.

The surge is fed by several forces, including radio and television talk shows and a general upswing in citizen interest in government, stimulated in the 1992 presidential election by the direct-voter-participation efforts of candidates Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown and Ross Perot.

But the principal cause, one that concerns many scholars and lawmakers because of its potential for manipulation, is the “grass-roots” lobbying done by special interests. In contrast with the not-so-distant past, when members of Congress identified hot issues from a handful of constituent letters, numerous interest groups have built sophisticated electronic networks that can generate an astonishing volume of calls and letters from folks in the hinterlands.

Some of the most technologically slick grass roots organizing is being mounted by groups ranging from the National Rifle Assn. to the National Abortion Rights Action League.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, is about to begin a phone bank that will call the chamber’s 215,000 members about issues of interest to the organization. Those answering the phone will be able to press 1 to have a Mailgram or letter sent in their name to their representative, press 2 to record a voice-mail message for the lawmaker or press 3 to have a computer connect them immediately with the lawmaker’s office.

Last week, the Phillip Morris tobacco company got smokers to flood the offices of members of the House Ways and Means Committee with phone calls protesting President Clinton’s proposal for a huge increase in cigarette taxes. Incensed aides to several committee members retaliated by sending dozens of “junk” documents to Phillip Morris’ Washington fax machine.

Many special-interest groups hire private businesses to carry out the direct-mail and phone-bank aspects of their grass-roots lobbying. One of the most successful is Jack Bonner and Associates, a Washington-based firm that assists only corporate interests.

Millions of cards and letters generated by the Bonner firm helped keep Northrop Corp.’s B-2 Stealth bomber alive, helped auto makers fight off tougher fuel-economy standards and helped banks defeat a forced reduction in credit-card interest rates.

The Stealth campaign in 1991 and 1992 involved getting 5,000 groups--including farm, senior citizens, minority, even religious groups--in more than 100 congressional districts to write their representatives, supporting the radar-evading bomber.

It was a tough sell--the Cold War was ending and the $800-million per copy bomber was under heavy fire as wasteful. But Bonner’s phone bank operators won over the groups’ leaders by arguing that the plane would save lives; they noted that the stealthy F-117 fighter built by Lockheed Corp. in Burbank had flown 3,200 missions in the Persian Gulf War without a loss.

In turn, the groups’ letters to Congress sounded precisely that theme, helping keep Los Angeles-area production lines going on a projected 20 planes.

“We chose groups in the congressional districts that we thought lawmakers would be most politically responsive to,” says Bonner, a former aide to the late Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.).

His firm also alerted lawmakers that the campaign was coming, so that they would be ready to respond to the outpouring.

“We never try to fool the Hill,” he says.

Bonner employs about 200 phone bank operators who have worked in government or in campaigns and are accustomed to discussing issues. When they call citizens seeking to generate phone calls and letters to legislators, they make clear what client they are representing, Bonner says.

Now, he says, his business is booming because defense, insurance, drug and other firms feel threatened by President Clinton’s proposed tax increases, spending cuts and health care reforms. These interests hope that orchestrated groundswells from the grass roots will help bend lawmakers to their causes.

“Corporate America has seen more and more that grass roots works,” Bonner says.

Which is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is setting up one of the most elaborate phone banks of all. The chamber hopes to form a huge base of activist members--grouped by business type and location--who will agree to be contacted by a computer-driven phone bank when a hot issue arises in Congress.

Chamber members will be mailed materials in advance that will background them on such issues as health reform. Then when a key vote looms, a computer will start dialing their numbers and a recorded message will give them the choices of sending a letter or voice-mail message, or being immediately plugged into their congressional representative’s office.

Later, the computer will print out the member’s choice so that chamber officials can gauge the size of their efforts and the cooperation of members.

“We think we are really making a quantum leap here,” says Don Kroes, who runs the chamber’s grass-roots activities.

The NRA, the powerful gun owners’ lobby, has made extensive use of a 900 number to enable its 3 million members and allies in 10,000 affiliated clubs to send an NRA-drafted letter to their representative or to be patched directly into the lawmaker’s office. The technique helped block congressional enactment of a waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on the sale of semiautomatic “assault weapons.”

“Constituents’ personal visits are the most effective on an issue, but after that it’s phone calls and letters,” says James Baker, the NRA’s chief lobbyist. “Postcards and petitions are the least effective.”

The success of such campaigns has not escaped the notice of the media-savvy Clinton Administration. Although the White House has decried the influence of special interests, it doesn’t shun their techniques.

The Democratic National Committee, in an unprecedented move, is helping to sell Clinton’s economic plan through phone-bank and direct-mail contacts with more than 1 million party activists. They are being urged to call lawmakers and talk shows, make speeches and write letters to newspaper editors.

Though many grass-roots efforts succeed, some fail miserably. Last year, cable TV owners, in ads and bill stuffers, got thousands of customers to protest a bill in Congress that the owners claimed would force cable rates up, not down as intended. Despite the torrent of calls and cards, Congress enacted the bill over the veto of then-President George Bush.

“We generated calls like mad. But the calls didn’t generate that many votes,” a cable lobbyist says ruefully.

While Washington phone lines have been heating up over the last decade because of such campaigns, they began to sizzle over the last year with outpourings of genuine citizen expression.

As Zoe Baird’s nomination for attorney general cruised toward Senate approval in late January, for example, Capitol offices suddenly were deluged with calls assailing her employment of two illegal aliens as domestic help. Senators swiftly abandoned their support of the corporate lawyer, and her nomination was withdrawn.

That stunning demonstration of grass-roots power was a potent catalyst, encouraging many citizens and groups to speak out as Clinton made controversial moves on gays in the military, spending, taxes and health care.

At the same time, the continuing proliferation of talk show hosts--especially the rabble-rousing variety--is helping to stimulate the cascade of calls and letters.

For example, on a daily talkfest, Herb Nero of KUTY in Palmdale constantly urges his 45,000 listeners to get in touch with their elected representatives. When he brings a member of Congress on the show, the phones ring off the hook, he says--and so do the phones in the lawmaker’s office.

Many lawmakers and scholars applaud the rising decibels of vox populi , saying it’s just what the architects of democracy ordered.

“Participatory democracy can produce an informed constituency, which is our best ally. An uninformed constituency is our worst enemy,” says Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.), chairman of a group of liberal House Democrats.

“It’s clearly healthy for representative democracy,” agrees Tony Blankley, an aide to conservative Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the House minority whip.

But others fear that the rising tide of citizen voices is so fraught with manipulation that the decision-making process is in danger of being twisted, especially if most of the expressions on an issue conflict with true public opinion.

For instance, many lawmakers report that, while calls to their offices are running heavily against Clinton’s economic proposals, sentiment on the streets back home matches the strong support in national polls.

“Politicians are hypersensitive to public preferences, and artificial stimulation of responses by interest groups simply intensifies the problem,” says Thomas E. Mann, a political scientist with the Brookings Institution. “It is one thing to vote after thoughtful deliberation. It is another to act on the basis of constituents’ spleens.”

Synar contends that “any politician worth his salt does not weigh his mail or count the number of phone calls in making a responsible decision.” But Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) fears that far too many colleagues do just that.

“This is a corruption of participatory democracy,” he grumps, referring to the efforts of interest groups to whip up calls and letters to lawmakers. “It means that those who are well-organized with special axes to grind will have an advantage over persons genuinely interested in the issues.”

Obey recalls that, when he entered Congress 24 years ago, “most of the mail was from people’s gut--simple letters they scratched out when something was bugging them. Now, the overwhelming majority of mail is ginned up by some Washington interest group trying to keep themselves in business by scaring the hell out of people--frothing them up to write or call their congressman.”

He concludes: “We have to elect people tough enough to discount the baloney.”

There are signs that hyped popular uprisings are beginning to backfire as lawmakers and their aides learn to distinguish scripted voices from truly spontaneous ones. For example, while Feinstein answers most letters, she ignores a closetful of printed postcards that have been sent in by members of anti-abortion and other groups.

But aides have a tougher time determining whether phone calls are organized or spontaneous.

Feinstein’s aides merely take down comments from callers without asking questions. But Sen. Bill Bradley’s office cross-examines many callers, attempting “to have people tell us why they feel a certain way,” says Anita Dunn, an aide to the New Jersey Democrat. “That gives us clues about what they are thinking.”

Interest groups assert that their grass-roots efforts are a healthy means of getting people in touch with their government. Some groups argue that the calls and letters they generate add important balance to debates.

For years, says Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, anti-abortion priests and preachers have passed out fliers in church pews, spurring floods of parishioner mail to government officials. Not until recently, she says, did her abortion rights group assemble a huge, computer-assisted network of activists that can spawn rivers of countervailing mail and calls.

In 1991, NARAL phone banks helped launch barrages of calls against the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, a federal judge accused by law professor Anita Faye Hill of sexual harassment. More than 100,000 messages swamped Senate offices during hearings on the charges.

“Senators begged us to call off the troops,” Michelman says. Thomas was confirmed by only a two-vote margin--and the uproar helped elect record numbers of women to office in 1992.

But the lobbying groups’ phone-jamming activity can be a double-edged sword. A lobbyist groaned recently that it took him three hours to get through the barrier of citizen calls to make an appointment with Sen. Bradley.