For Chris Lewis, it was a short step from working as a painter on the outside of houses to thinking about houses as objects of social policy.
"It was apparent to me as I worked more and more on houses in rich Detroit suburbs that we had enough of that kind of housing," he says. "But what we needed was more low-income housing."
It was only natural, then, that Mr. Lewis would wind up in Washington, working on social policy issues that affect low-income communities and consumers in general.
His started as a lobbyist for the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now quitting graduate school midway through a doctoral program and then moved on to he Consumer Federation for America two years ago.
Frequently at odds with the banking industry, Mr. Lewis is pressing now for limits on bank fees.
His organization published a study contending that ATM fees are too high, and more recently he asked the Department of Justice's antitrust division to investigate bank pricing practices.
Mr. Lewis learned more about how Washington works at his father' s knee than from any graduate course. His father, Jake Lewis, spent three decades on the House Banking Committee staff, with brief respites to work on the presidential campaigns of such favored liberals as Hubert Humphrey.
A Power Center
During his last 10 years on the committee, under four chairmen, Mr. Lewis was a power center in his own right a staffer who knew which levers to pull to get things done on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Lewis speaks admiringly of his father. "He just knew how everything worked," he recalls. "I learned a lot from him about how to operate on the Hill."
Mr. Lewis also inherited his father's deep liberal convictions and his love for policy issues.
"Politics and policy were dinner talk in our house."
Chris Lewis
Lobbyist
Consumer Federation of America
1424 16th St. NW, Suite 604
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-387-6121
