Jonathan Alter Quotes
I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill -- it finds its way.
Alter, Jonathan. The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies. Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Hollings who was one of the senior experienced senators was offended by the degree to which the George W. Bush Administration and the Republican leadership had turned to lobbyists to draft legislation and amendments to pending legislation. Lobbyists often have specialized information that members of Congress do not have, so there has been in modern times communications between lobbyists and members of Congress and their staffs. However, during the Bush Presidency the practice reached an extreme where lobbyists would even write the legislative language and give it to the members in whom they had invested by giving them large campaign contributions and many perks. K Street is the fanciest street in Washington DC with some of the most expensive office space. A substantial proportion of the lobbyists have K Street offices, hence the metaphor.
At the time this was a very widely held, bipartisan view. See {634818} . Given statements like this, TR if he were alive today would never be able to get the Republican Nomination for President; nor could he obtain the Democratic Nomination because of his view on the military, expansionism, defense spending and war.
See {640687}. He was then very worried about the influence of money in politics and was willing to risk his own reelection by limiting his contributions. And he was the Republican presidential candidate so his policy was particularly unusual. A century later money in politics had ballooned to a much larger problem as Taft’s action had little or no effect on the overall relationship between money and politics outside of his campaign.
Jonathan H. Alter is a liberal American journalist, best-selling author, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and television producer who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011. Alter has written several books about American presidents, most recently His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, published in 2020, the first independent biography of Carter. Alter is a contributing correspondent to NBC News, where since 1996 he has appeared on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC. He was also a frequent guest on Imus in the Morning and The Al Franken Show on Air America Radio. In 2013 and 2014, Alter served as an executive producer on the Amazon Studios production Alpha House, which starred John Goodman, Mark Consuelos, Clark Johnson, and Matt Malloy. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists," a documentary about the columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, which received a 2020 Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Documentary.
