Political Access Quotes

Money buys access; access buys influence.

The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.

We don't have the Democrats doing a Fox News debate. They have decided they want to boycott Fox News, at least this election cycle. I don't see Hillary and Bernie Sanders doing a Fox News debate. And they should. We have great journalists on this network. I'm an opinion person. It wouldn't be me - that I think would do a great job. But if they're not going to put themselves in an environment like this, do you have to now reconsider, in other words, going forward, that maybe these liberal networks don't deserve the access to these candidates?

I think that too far, too much, to a greater degree than is anywhere near appropriate, America and our politics are being governed by more and more powerful interests, by fewer and fewer people in the sense of the amount of money that has controlled access and other kinds of things.

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.

Lobbyist influence comes from access, not money.

I was able to do something that people can't do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there's an implication that you are, that matters.

Donald Trump has declared that he's going to divest himself from his companies and that his sons will be separated from the government. But his sons who run the company are regularly attending his meetings with senators, making it clear to everybody, you want access to Trump you pay.

Celebrity gets you access to world leaders.

In Democratic administrations, I visit the White House.

Access is an earned, essential raw material for the lobbying process but vastly overrated as a finished product all by itself. No dam was ever built ... solely on the basis of access.

I'm thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.

Bush made a point of emphasizing to me that unlike his father's administration, his was one of significant "walk-in access" to the Oval Office.

The journalists are so devoted to Obama. They are such sycophants that they're worried about access.

The increasing supply of lobbyists should have driven the price of lobbying down, not up. … The most credible explanation … is that clients grew more and more confident that their lobbyists could deliver something of value in exchange for their fees. … The reason companies started buying, in other words, was that Congress began selling.

You can't take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak or something like that. But you can take him to a fund-raising lunch and not only buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fund-raiser - and have all the same access and all the same interactions with that congressman.

My position has always been that the House of Representatives does not take reservations. It's walk-in only.

In the Indian community there was always a problem. People could not approach the politicians the right way. They’re not confident.

Everyone else is represented in Washington by a powerful lobby ... But there is no lobby for the people.

It's in the nature of the Presidency that most of the people youy meet want something.

Big money buys access in Washington, and access purchases influence. It is as simple as that. And they have basically given a green light, a further green light, after Citizens United, to the biggest money to have the bigger voice in our politics, and to sound out and drown out the voice of just ordinary citizens.

Corporations are economic entities or structures, and yet they're allowed to fund political candidates, and when those candidates are elected, guess who gets in the door first? It's corporations.

Members of Congress have more in common with the people they hobnob in Washington, D.C., than they do with the people they're supposed to represent.

Today we have families that can buy a congressman and families that cannot buy food for the table.