That's not how democracy works. When people don't like what's going on, they work until they change it. What they won't do is "give it a rest".
This guy has huge ties to IBM, I'd have a very hard time believing he has the public's best interests in mind. He's more likely to pass laws which would help his rich friends instead.
Note that I'm not a strong believer of government to begin with. My rationale is that if society is anything like software development, management should be seen as counter-productive.
The people living in democracies without lobbying wholeheartedly agree. We genuinely can't believe you let it happen.
By voting for all issues directly, like it's done here in switzerland.
Other systems where you vote people into office to do the actual decision making for you can hardly be called democracies in comparison.
In many US states, they allow ballot measures, but they are often worse than the options that would come out of the legislature because of the free for all nature of advertising for them and the general public's lack of knowledge of the details of the proposal. They do, however, allow issues such as gay marriage/pot to come up if it's too controversial for the legislature.
Your assertion that you and others live in democracies without such a process is false. Moreover your implication that lobbying is wholly negative and unique to the American democratic system undermines your position and demonstrates what appears to be a bias against the United States in general rather than an honest critique of the way lobbying is conducted in that country.
Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...
And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.
This guy is just a mundane man defending his existence. Nothing more, nothing less.
[1] The right to petition your government.
If you think that, in the abstract, the government should be able to favor/disfavor particular businesses (e.g. mandating Ethanol in gasoline, taxing tanning salons, prohibiting large sugary-drinks, etc) then the logical consequence is lobbying to ensure that your particular business is favored or at least not disfavored and that right (the right to petition the government) is built-in to our Constitution.
The way out of this mess is not to try to micro-manage lobbying (e.g. it is OK for a non-profit to lobby but not a for-profit or it is OK for individuals to lobby but not on behalf of a corporation) but instead to tackle the larger problem that governments should not be micro-managing the economy.
So argue for things like removing loopholes and special cases from our tax code, ditching all sorts of direct subsidies to favored entities (PBS funding, for example), and otherwise advocating for simple, consistent, and broad-based government policies rather than complex, inconsistent, and narrow government policies is the right direction, IMHO.
I'm not holding my breath, though.
Simple. Consistent. Transparent.
These should be the guidelinses of every goverment agecny.
That why I am for things like the flat tax, NGDP targeting (monetary policy), open data goverment ...
The good side of lobbying allows for some interest group, lets use the people who do commercial fishing in the gulf as an example, to pay attention to their interests and let someone know about problems in legislation they foresee or notice after the fact. Without them, each congressman (or some subset of them) would have to employ someone who knew a thing or two about marine/environmental biology to read all their legislation for ways that it could harm x. It's really unpopular for congress to spend money on itself, so this probably wouldn't happen and we'd ignore environmental impacts of a wide variety of things.
This, of course, is in theory. I whole heatedly agree that the balance of power between interest groups and of interest groups isn't at any sort of ideal point, but I can't see removing their ability to communicate with politicians as a good thing. Lobbyists do a whole lot more than just donate to crooked politicians.