DICK MORRIS

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future.

The old rules and the old methods of winning are gone.

Anybody who thinks that getting a communication from a voter in your district is spam - that guy is pork. Roast pork unless he changes his point of view.

Democrats are not about to nominate anyone who backs the tax cut, and Americans are not going to elect anyone who favors a tax increase.

'Yes' is a far more potent word than 'no' in American politics. By adopting the positions which animate the political agenda for the other side, one can disarm them and leave them sputtering with nothing to say.

Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood.

I didn't do what they said I did. I may have done enough so that I don't know if I can prove my innocence.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination.

I love Karl Rove. He elected Bush.

No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.

We need to stop spending money on death, the war in Iraq and on enhancing the lives of the people in our own country.

I like Bill Clinton.

Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form.

The stronger Hillary is, the weaker she is. The more she seems like a likely presidential winner, the more difficult the senate race becomes in New York. It's perfect.

As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.

Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words 'gay marriage' are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.

The Democratic Party opposes tax cuts but it cannot say so publicly. Thus, it is forced to support the idea of lowering the tax burden but using class warfare rhetoric to dispute the allocation of the relief.

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.

A President has to do the image stuff that will help him so that he can do the substantive things he wants to do.

Polls are not the instruments of the mob. They offer the prospect of leadership wedded to a finely calibrated measurement of opinion.

You have a lot of ideas …. I want them so I can test them.

Internet referendums will not, in the beginning, have any legally binding effect, but they will be politically binding.

An elected executive—whether President, governor or mayor—needs a popularity majority every day in his term.

President Clinton does not use polls to reach positions. He takes positions and then uses the polls to survive the experience.