Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The American psyche has not recovered, and likely will not ever fully recover, from the profound and relentless incompetence of George W. Bush's disastrous, multitrillion-dollar war.
Over the course of history, governments, political regimes, and leaders have done some stupid things despite all arguments to the contrary, at times even against their own self-interest.
Bill Clinton is a person who causes a lot of passion both ways about people, and there's certainly a lot of turmoil if you look back at the eight years. But there was a lot of good, too.
I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country - something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning - is the all-powerful elite narrative.
Why are you sitting here when our democracy is under assault with the FBI acting at the behest of [Republican Congressman] Jason Chaffetz and sitting here acting like it is something legit?
Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.
The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was because there were more Democrats that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.
When one has retired from the ranks of American domestic political consulting, as I have, you are not really allowed to just quit. You become emeritus, of counsel, senior status, and God knows what.
You know there's nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.
What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something, and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do.
There is nothing going on and in the meantime we do know that our democracy is under assault by the KGB. To me, that's something we ought to be talking about. That's a relevant issue in this campaign [2016].
I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a 400 basball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.
The only person that ever stumbles is a guy moving forward. You don't stumble backwards; you stumble forward, and you never stumble when you're stationary. So don't worry about stumbling. Keep pushing it forward.
We ought to be talking about our democracy being under assault right now and what we're going to do about it and not what somebody said in July about James Comey. That's a distraction, that's not what's going on.
When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.
I've never seen a candidate - I've never seen a human being - who, with the most limited briefing, can understand the dimensions, the parameters, the nuances of everything of any kind of a policy or political problem.
There's a simple doctrine. Outside of a person's love the most sacred thing they can give is their labor. Labor is a very precious thing you have and any time you can combined labor and love you've really made a match.
When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn't say anything.
This is not class warfare, this is generational warfare. This administration and old wealthy people have declared war on young people. That is the real war that is going on here. And that is the war we've got to talk about.
Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast - that was an act of God ... Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds.
I have people ask me if I'm going to convince my daughters to be Democrats, and I say, 'I have yet to convince my daughters to close a door.' I don't how in the world I would ever convince them to be in a political affiliation.
Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you're smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is. That's why I'm a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think whatever I want them to.
I point out the Democratic party won two world wars and beat the depression, cut out the poverty by two thirds, and was responsible for the same sustained prosperity that we've had in the United States. What the hell do we have to apologize for?
What's the real difference between Republicans and Democrats? Let me tell ya the real difference ... Republicans will always take on people in the interest of power and good democrats will never fear to take on the power in the interests of people.
When you run for president, and become president, they just rip you apart. Every facade of privacy that you have is gone. I think everybody believes that, to some extent, you can maintain privacy. And I think in the end, everybody gets proven wrong.
I know a bit about selling books, and you need a good title - a catchy concoction with a little Cajun spice, something that will make folks stop in the aisles, turn away from the Grisham novels and the latest crazy diet fad, and pick up your masterpiece.
In 1992, the most treasured voter was a voter that would sort of swing back and forth, one that might vote for Republican for president, Democrat for governor. The voter that didn't have that strong of a partisan ID. These were the voters that we targeted.
I grew up in a French-dominated Catholic part of the country. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. I have a cousin who is a priest - it's part of my DNA. It's kind of hard to separate me from the church, to try to say where one starts and the other stops.
My high school job was putting insulation in attics - in Louisiana in the summer. It must have been 95 degrees every day, and the insulation used to get all over me. It was not fun. But I didn't know any different. It wasn't like I was spending summers on Cape Cod.
We say there are people who have worked in campaigns who say that they have lost some - and we call those folks operatives, managers, strategists, consultants; and then there are people who work in campaigns and say that they have never lost, and we call them liars.
I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.
You are sitting here defending an assault on American democracy. Somebody probably said nice things about anybody at a given point. This is an unprecedented event that was done at the behest of the House Republicans that was leaked to the press by the House Republicans.
Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition, and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.
The thing to remember about Obama is he doesn't care if you like him or I like him or somebody else does. He literally would rather do homework with his kids than be around other politicians. Does this make him unpopular at times? Yes. Does it make him ineffective? Most certainly not.
If you want to believe that the government's coming for our guns or that being gay is a choice and a sin or that ObamaCare signals the end of civilization or that cutting taxes for rich people is the path to a better America, that's your choice. I'm never going to believe in any of that.
I think this an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election [2016] is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for [James] Comey. That's what I think.
Like a lot of people, I pray for a sick relative or that kind of thing, but I don't pray to make my next flight connection at the airport. I find prayers before sports contests to be insensitive and kind of demeaning, at least when someone prays to beat the other team or something like that.
Democrats, myself included, tend to respect and value expertise and find that people who have established a record of accuracy and developed a model that's proven to be beneficial over time should be people accorded great deference when they opine on a topic that they have demonstrated past mastery over.
[ James Comey] was acting in concert and coordination with the House Republicans. End of story. He gave a letter to them. They gave it to FOX News. Also, we have this extraordinary case of the KGB being involved in this race and selectively leaking things from the [Hillary] Clinton campaign that they hacked.
You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what: I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true.
I made the argument that every growing demographic in this country - nonwhite voters, younger people - is trending Democratic. It's a ticking time bomb for the GOP. That's why I felt safe in saying that 'Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into Democratic advantages in 2010 or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on.'
Some of these people think the universe is five thousand years old, and they say it with a straight face. If somebody had an explanation saying why they thought the earth was five thousand years old, there's only two possible explanations: you're really stupid, or you're really cynical and trying to get really stupid people's votes.
Back when I went to Louisiana State University a million years ago, we got the Baton Rouge paper. But if you wanted to read 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal,' you had to go to the reading room of the student union, and you got the edition several days after it had been published, and you had to read it on a wooden stick.
American democracy is really under attack here [Clinton campaign that was hacked]. And the question is how are we and in particular and how are Democrats going to respond to this. We have to understand this is really, really quite extraordinary. And it would seem to me that the FBI shouldn't be getting rolled by the House Republicans and that's what happened here.