President Obama is asking the Democratic National Committee to make Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) its new chair. (National committees routinely accede to such requests.) Our textbook(p. 287) quotes a brief profile of her in a 2008 book on power in Washington. She was quite candid about political money:
Wasserman Schultz makes no apology for the role money plays in the process, calling allegations of corruption on Pennsylvania Avenue "overrated." Campaign donations simply become one device among many, she explains, that help members decide how to spend their time. If she returns to her office to find thirty phone messages, “of the thirty, you're going to know ten of them. Anyone is going to make phone calls to the people they know first. I'm going to call the people I know. Among the people I know are donors.”
-- John Harwood and Gerald F. Seib, Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Power (Random House, 2008, pp. 84-85).
