John Podhoretz Quotes
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Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.
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Why, listening to Obama talk about his economic triumphs over the last three years might make you want to move to the country he was describing. Too bad that country exists primarily in his own head.
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Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.
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Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.
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Insulting the electorate and accusing it of spiritual weakness and sinfulness are not the ways to get yourself the job of president.
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But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.
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Political folk talk a lot these days about 'messaging' - a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive - i.e., 'Our messaging is designed to show we care.'
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You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.
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I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.
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Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.
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There's no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There's only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.
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Is victory sweet because your side wins - or is it really because the other side loses?
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The problem is that borrowing money to pay back more borrowed money that will oblige you in the future to borrow even more money doesn't sound kosher. Because it isn't.
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One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.
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Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.
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I look at 'The New York Review of Books.' It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred.
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Obama's victory in November 2008 was a historic political accomplishment.
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Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.
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This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.
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Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.
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Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.
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Obama is talking to voters as though he is their boss, or their principal, or their father. He is not any of those things. He is their employee. And employers don't like it when their employees yell at them - even if their employees have it right.
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Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.
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I've worked as someone's deputy, and now it's time for me to run something. It's time for me to run my own shop.