After Victor Paz's government, I was still in politics, but I personally spent a lot of time consulting and working with Argentina, with Peru, and in Brazil.
When you become a consultant to a political party, your views are no longer objective. You do it at a cost.
I would have been a Republican, if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls.
I remember having lunch with a friend who worked at the White House. I'd just graduated from law school but kept telling my friend what they needed to do and weren't doing right about the Iran-Contra affair. The next day, I got a call from the White House, offering me a job.
Lee Atwater,[Ronald] Reagan's strategist, had no patience for CPAC, because he thought they were sort of wild and immature, basically.
Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan have a lot in common - they're both smarter than their husbands and both consulted the stars for guidance, Nancy with astrology and Hillary with Barbra Streisand.
So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.
I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.
Kissinger's major, and most lucrative role, has come as head of Kissinger Associates in New York City, founded on a loan obtained in 1982 from the international banking firm of E.M. Warburg, Pincus and Company. Nominally, Kissinger Associates (KA) is an "international consulting firm" but "consultant" covers many sins, and in KA's case, this means international political influence-peddling for its two dozen or so important corporate clients.
Bill Clinton was giving the Clinton campaign the best advice.
I don't want to be a lobbyist. I want to provide strategic advice to companies. I said both of those things in the course of the interview, and I made clear this is a matter only for after I had become a private citizen and I was no longer a member of parliament.
Pollsters get paid by the poll, ad makers by the ad, phone-calling firms by the call, direct-mailers by the piece. They all have an incentive to promote their services, whether or not doing so helps the campaign win—and they face few consequences if it doesn’t.
Ball had conducted a major study of Political Consultants and their effect on campaign success.
The consultant is selling something to the candidate. The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits. In the words of a consultant, ”There’s nothing better than a scared, rich candidate.”
I am the political psychiatrist to the stars.
When you have the Chief of Staff of the Republican National Committee and the political director of the Romney campaign, and their two companies get $150 million at the end of the campaign for the 'fantastic' get-out-the-vote program... some of this borders on RICO violations.
I can give substantive advice to the administration, the president's campaign, or any campaign that would ask for it. And, of course, when I speak I can talk about my views on policy and I have been supportive of the president's policy on leading foreign-policy issues.
As an opinion manager, a campaign consultant, fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negatives.
I am the first to admit that I am not the greatest campaign strategist or political analyst.
Doing consulting and government relations on the hill took up a lot less time than running a record store and brought in a lot more money
For the year after I left government service, I worked as a consultant to the Republican National Committee because the lawyers advised that was the proper way for me to comply with ethics regulations and continue to advise the President.
If you want to run for the United States Senate, you hire a consultant who will do polling for you, who will tell you the kinds of television ads you should run, who will tell you that most of the money you raise has got to go into TV. Raising money, and then putting that money into the hands of consultants, who then put on TV ads - that's more or less what campaigns are about. We've got to change that.
If you're trained as a proper political consultant, you should be able to undertake your profession no matter who the client is.