Who can forget Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist? In a pleasant operation called “Gimme Five,” he took on Indian tribes as clients, ostensibly to lobby in support of their interests in casino gambling. Privately, Abramoff described them as “morons” and “troglodytes” as he and his associates grossly overbilled the tribes, raking in $85 million while, at times, covertly working against their interests.

In 2006, Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe members of Congress. He was sentenced to four years in jail and was released to a halfway house in June 2010.

The array of astonishingly corrupt activity that became known as the Abramoff scandal is just one of many reasons why lobbyists come in dead last — behind car salesmen — in national polls on honesty, with only 5 percent of Americans giving them a “high” rating for ethical standards. The public scorn is nothing new. Walt Whitman, the 19th-century poet, famously denounced “lobbyers” as “crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the Earth.”

Just the same, last year nearly 13,800 lobbyists were registered to try to sway the White House, the Congress and government agencies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that tracks money in U.S. politics. Businesses, trade associations and other groups spent a record $3.5 billion in 2009 on lobbying, more than twice as much as in 2000.

But contrary to popular belief, Washington is not widely for sale to special interests and the K Street lobbyists they hire, at least not in the short term. One of the most in-depth studies ever conducted on the day-to-day workings of Washington, and the only one based on a random sample — the prizewinning 2009 book, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses and Why — reveals that the groups with the most money and lobbyists don’t necessarily get their congressional way. In fact, an analysis of about 100 randomly selected issues with interest-group involvement shows that advocates on both sides of an issue tend to form diverse coalitions, more or less equalizing their resources.

Wealthy interests weigh in from all directions. Unions and citizen groups lack financial clout but are recognized as major actors. There are many moving parts in politics, and money is just one of them.

The real outcome of most lobbying — in fact, its greatest success — is the achievement of nothing, the maintenance of the status quo. “Sixty percent of the time, nothing happens,” says Frank Baumgartner, one author of the book and a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “What we see is gridlock and successful stalemating of proposals, with occasional breakthroughs. We see a pattern of no change, no change and no change — and then some huge reform.”

But those large reforms — such as health care for 32 million uninsured Americans under President Barack Obama, the scheduled phase-out of the estate tax under President George W. Bush, and the normalization of trade relations with China under President Bill Clinton — are far more often linked to a change in who inhabits the White House than to campaign contributions or K Street hires.

The weak link between money and policy change is counterintuitive but understandable, the authors say. The balance of power in Washington already hugely favors the rich. The status quo reflects the considerable advantages the wealthy have managed to secure in the law, down through the generations.