I want to be the kind of elected official who not only pays attention but who acts on behalf of people - just average people. Fancy lobbyists get to tell their story, but the average person doesn't.
When you work in the White House you talk to the White House staff all day, so you're talking to the guy who handles the congressional liaison and the guy who's handling domestic politics and the guy who's handling the American economy and so forth.
Now Barack Obama, who campaigned for transparency, is the President defending secret negotiations on new trade agreements that are largely being written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. He would give corporations the key to the treasury while he gets the authority to fast track another hammering of working people and the environment. Yet the only people who get a real tongue-lashing from this President's White House are progressives around town who dare to call him on the carpet for abandoning his promises.
Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.
I vividly remember my first day on the White House staff. My office, of course, was in the Old Executive Office Building. I didn't rate one in the West Wing; but don't try to tell me or any of the rest of us working there that we weren't working in the White House.
To this day, I can't understand why the closest man to Jimmy Carter, the key staff guy at the White House, didn't even join us at the White House breakfast meetings where we discussed upcoming legislation with the president. This was unprecedented. People used to say that Jordan was the most brilliant guy around, but you couldn't prove it by me.
The White House has finally found one guy that kinda remembers serving with President Bush in the National Guard. Now they just need to find someone who remembers Bush working on an economic plan. ... I think the White House spent more money looking for this guy than finding weapons of mass destruction.
Holding political leaders accountable on behalf of voters is at the core of what I do every day in my role as Chief White House Correspondent, so to do it on the national stage at a critical moment in the primary is a responsibility I take really seriously.
My enemy is not the average white guy, its not the kid down the block or the kids I see on the streets. My enemy is the white I don't see: the people in The white House, the corporate monoply owners. Fake liberal politicians-those are my enemies.
The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter.
On behalf of every Republican and every Democrat in Congress, on behalf of the whole House, I want our friends in the Jewish community to know that we stand with them.
I am a member of that small, little group that covers - I`m a member of the White House correspondents association. I go to the White House every day.
I live. I travel. I eat. I pray. These are the things I do. I'd rather be in my condition than be a man with four children in a four-bedroom house, working hard every day to pay for his house, taking his children to school.
I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years.
When I go up there, I see coal lobbyists, oil lobbyists, natural gas lobbyists, nuclear power lobbyists, somehow they think that's where the action is in Congress.
I've spent 30 years, actually maybe a little more, working to help kids and families. And I want to take all that experience to the White House and do that every single day.