$100,000 donors buy access to Congress and the White House. We believe it's long past time to clean up Washington.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the influence of money in politics and the need for reform.
William J. Clinton's quote emphasizes the significant power that wealthy donors possess in influencing government decisions and access to political leaders, particularly in Congress and the White House. It calls for a necessary reform in the political system to reduce the impact of money in politics and advocate for a cleaner, more transparent governance process.
In practice
Using this quote in a political debate to emphasize the need for campaign finance reform.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
In every country today, there is politics. It may be authoritarian politics, but there is politics.
What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.
The Latin root of the word 'politics' means 'of the people.' Politics is about something bigger than electoral politics; in that sense, I feel like I'm already involved.
The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us.
Karl Rove thinks we shouldn’t have Hillary Clinton in the White House because she fell and hit her head a couple years ago, spent three days in the hospital, and maybe she has brain damage. You know, I don’t recall the Republicans being this concerned with mental fitness during the years when Reagan was talking to house plants in the White House.
The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting.
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