Jonathan Alter Quotes

We have to get rid of the constant fundraising that happens inside the Congress. Before, political parties used to raise money; now, individual members are raising money through the DCCC and the RCCC. It is absolutely corrupt.

Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.

We have become part-time Senators and full time fund-raisers. Even the schedule of the Senate itself is now arranged around the need to raise money for the next political campaign, rather than around the need to solve the nation's problems and do the people's business.

The arms race for money being what it is, fundraising starts shortly after someone is elected to Congress.

So long as politicians need millions to win a seat in Congress and nearly a billion to contest the White House, they will sanctify the methods needed to raise such sums.

This [political fundraising] is a very sophisticated system … This is a legalized bribery system where no one has to say anything. I don’t have to say what I want—you [the politician] know what I want.

To get on an important [Congressional] committee, a member has to raise a certain amount of money per election cycle. If he does not, he will be dropped from the committee. Both parties actually have a formal price tag for that they call A, B and C committees.

There's no one silver bullet, but money really is the root of all evil. The single biggest problem is how much more money is flooding into politics these days. It not only tends to enable a more extreme candidate to get elected, but because so much money is required to bankroll a campaign, everyone spends all their free time fundraising instead of reaching across the aisle.

I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.

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.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

You now have six-year campaigns for the Senate - you never stop running. It's not uncommon for a member of the Senate to have a fundraising breakfast, a fundraising lunch and a fundraising dinner, and then when the Senate breaks for the week to go home, more fundraisers. And that's driven by the cost of campaigning.

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

Spending limits not only do not work, they have the perverse effect of making special interests more powerful and more influential.

Eventually, money wins in politics.

It is not that candidates who get the most money win, but that winning candidates get the most money.

It is campaign money that calls the tune, a fact recognized by every politician within a few minutes after getting into politics.

A $5,000 campaign contribution to a member of Congress will hardly get you a thank you these days.

Money in politics leads to bad things—and I am bipartisan in that view.

Most scandals involve broken laws. In the case of the congressional campaign financing system, the laws themselves are the scandal.

Politicians can be bought and often are.

It challenges a linguist to define modern campaign contributions as something other than bribery.

I’m hedging my bets. We got campaign contributions to both sides.

Campaign contributors are operating vicariously through the power of their purse rather than through the power of their ideas.

In running for Congress, you have to raise over $2 million. You are going to end up shaking hands with people with whom you would rather not shake hands. 95 percent of all the candidates with the most money, win.