The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.
The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, not persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone somewhere saying something stupid—but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it’s the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We’re tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass.
We have created our own monster. The three P's. Platforms, Primaries and PACs. The combination of all this reform [allows] the ideological activists of both parties to dominate the [presidential] nomination.
I think we have to acknowledge that the way to get back into the majority into the Congress and pick up seats is to make sure we are a big-tent party and reaching out to people that are moderate and not just push to the left.
The Republican Party and the conservative movement cannot unify around a single proposition, and the Democrats easily do. They have total contempt for us.
Nothing ever stays in the middle. You always go from one extreme to the other, and politics is certainly that way.
Attacks on the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system tend to come from the most disreputable and ill-informed voices in conservatism — and from the most highly-esteemed and knowledgeable authorities in liberalism.
A bit of irony in this quote.
The Tea Party isn't out to be a third force in American politics. Instead, it has infiltrated the Republicans and remoulded them in its own image.
As between Mr. Davis [the Democratic nominee] and President Coolidge, it is hard to discern much difference. Essentially the Democratic and Republican nominees for the presidency stand for the same thing.
Personalization is everywhere. We are constantly asked, directly or indirectly, to create Our Own Whatever - containing and limited to our 'favorite sources of information.' Republicans do that; Democrats do it; environmentalists do it; terrorists do it; science fiction enthusiasts do it. That's a real problem, I think.
