Lobbyists are the touts of protected industries.
The permanent institutional expertise class is now no longer the legislators, it's the lobbyists who don't have term limits and are there forever.
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.
Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky. Nothing they did was really illegal.
Get yourself a few ‘Dime a Dozen Generals,’ bid high in the ‘former statesmen lobby auction’, and put in your pocket one or two ‘ex-congressmen turned lobbyists’ who know the ropes when it comes to pocketing a few dozen who still serve.
The Republican Party has steadfastly sided with its donors and its lobbyists, and this is why we're where we are.
These were lobbyists—many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.
I've never seen Barack Obama as a progressive, just someone a bit more centrist, and not as right leaning as Hillary Clinton. Obama may make friends with a lot of K street lobbyists. The progressive blogosphere may be able to raise enough of a cry to persuade him that he doesn't need them, that he can get by with a few million people on the net financially supporting him.
Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.
I don't want to make a member of Congress do something that that member of Congress's constituents would not approve of, or would not agree to. So in that regard, I'm kind of the opposite of a lobbyist.
The studies that show the reason Washington real estate is booming and there are so many lobbyists in town, it does pay.
Alexi Giannoulias' top aide was a longtime BP lobbyist.
My sense of American politics is that most of our politicians are for sale, whether they are out and out crooked, or simply beholden to corporate interests because they've taken so much money from their lobbyists.
Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures.
Fairness has not been enhanced by the tax code, but lobbyists have been made rich, politicians have been re-elected, and the economy has been made to suffer.
Most of the women I spoke to were pushing agendas that they felt connected to - more so than with the male lobbyists I met with.
Maybe that's because there are so few women lobbyists; if they're there, it's for something they strongly believe in, not just for financial gain.
Someone doesn't think immediately, "I want to be a lobbyist."
My four years as governor, I never met with a lobbyist once, never. Not one lobbyist got in my office.
Barack Obama's large contributor was Goldman Sachs - same thing on the Republican side. If you go to both their conventions, you see the same lobbyists paying off both sides so they win either way.
In his first speech as Speaker, Boehner thanked his loved ones - tobacco lobbyists, the oil companies, the CEOs.
Lobbying is not a bad thing. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have lobbyists or we shouldn't have lobbying to petition our government. It's in the Constitution, and it's something that should be honorable and good.
I got into lobbying kind of against my will at first. I frankly didn't want to be a lobbyist, but I realized that in lobbying I could do things politically that were interesting to me and do some what I thought would be good. I'm not sure it all turned out like that, but at least that was some of the initial thinking.
Lobbyists really are experts in their fields and know what they are talking about. That's why the government always listens to them as they tell the government what it's doing wrong and what it should be doing instead.
To be effective at selling ideas, at being a lobbyist, influencing other people, you have to be very sure of yourself.
