Ross Douthat Quotes

I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist.

President Obama is perhaps the most ideologically-motivated president in American history. But according to the ultimate authority, Barack Obama, he's a mere pragmatist.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

Rather than making loose and unsubstantiated claims that Obama and Clinton created ISIS, it would behoove Trump if he advanced some real policy ideas about how to solve the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars. Of course, to do that he would have to get beyond the inflammatory slogans and sound bites that have characterized his campaign.

For eight years Republicans worked around the clock to delegitimize Bill Clinton. For the next eight years, Democrats tried to delegitimize Bush. Now Barack Obama is enduring the rage of his conservative opposition.

In an age when stagecraft, gauzy themes, and sound-bites have too often been substituted for leadership, Bill Clinton as a candidate made it essential to campaigning to take the specifics of governance seriously. Practical solutions were 'in;' ideology was 'out.'

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

Just because everybody else is engaged in a group hug with Barack Obama doesn't mean that somebody doesn't have to tell the truth.

There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

My dad thinks Obama is a socialist and all these extreme views.

She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

I'm strictly for Stevenson. I don't dig the intellectual bit, but I'm telling you, man, he knows the most.

'2016' is based on an experiment: what if you let Obama do it himself? That experiment is necessarily limited because I'm not factoring in a Republican House, a Supreme Court or the tug of public opinion.

Since the heady days of the 2009 Inauguration, middle-class independents have grown increasingly distant from Obama. Working-class voters - always more enamored of Clinton - have grown even more wary and distrustful of the Chicagoan. Both voting blocs pose the danger of serious defection in 2012. Without their support, Obama cannot win.

No political cliche can stand up to reality.

This election is not about ideology. It's about competence.

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

There are some people who are so partisan that they do not live in the word the rest of us are in.

Avoid false choices driven by ideology.

In our "age of the expert" the expert has his constituency — those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining the consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.

People at the political extremes have an advantage over the rest of us. Only they seem to know exactly who and what is wrong with America and precisely what policies and programs should be adopted to fix it.

Sometimes the agency head is picked because he or she is thought to be an expert on the subject, but many times the President has no real idea of the content or policy implications of this expertise.

Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning..