Again, these things tend to be context dependent. It's always easy to think of single examples and then try to generalize them to everybody. I think that both people who are in power obviously have access to power in certain ways, and therefore one has to be careful about what their previous associations were and how they deal with those in the context of their current environment. I think it's equally important to go the other way--that is, someone who previously had access, and is now in another context, can produce the same result and ought to be dealt with in a similar way.
On May 16th, 2006. See this statement in context.