The Republican Party needs to, first of all, quit electing people in primaries that have prehistoric notions about women's issues.
— Mark McKinnon
Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.
Immigration is the most explosive issue I've seen in my political career.
Special interests and opponents have figured out how easy it is to disrupt town halls and get their own message out. The days of the truly free-form town halls may be over.
If Democrats start consistently winning Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, the electoral outlook for Republicans in the future is mighty bleak.
Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.
My brother is one of my true heroes. Steady and sober where I am impulsive and emotional.
It's just madness. First email. Then instant message. Then MySpace. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. It's not enough anymore to 'Just do it.' Now we have to tell everyone we are doing it, when we are doing it, where we are doing it and why we are doing it.
A few words about Sarah Palin: She is one of the most fascinating women I have ever met. She crackles with energy like a live electrical wire and on first meeting gets about three inches from your face.
Presidents should do whatever possible and practical to encourage an environment of cooperation and bipartisanship. And they should maintain a certain level of decorum, diplomacy and decency. But, at the end of the day, presidents get elected to enact change.
I don't buy the argument that there can't be a successful independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. People who say, 'It can't happen,' are many of the same people who said we'd never elect an African American.
Now personally, I think the president should golf every day and never have a press conference. I want the leader of the free world to be as stress-free as possible. And if golf helps fade the psychic heat from the job, by all means tee it up often, Mr. President.
Rand Paul comes off like an academic stiff who wants to give us a lecture on American civics.
Great presidents, and even those not so great, never complained about the hands they were dealt. Just the opposite. They assumed they were in the big chair to meet big challenges, no matter how difficult.
When you look at the money spent by labor unions for Democrats, it comes as no surprise the Democrats crafted a campaign-finance 'disclosure' bill with the thresholds adjusted to exempt unions.
Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.
Republicans constantly claim to be the party that defends the Constitution. We have no legitimate right to that claim until we get right on gay rights.
Negativity drove me out of politics in the mid-Nineties.
Unfortunately, in American politics there are no standards for shame.
When people see political ads, they think someone's lying to them.
It's much more powerful and compelling to create a positive vision than it is to tear somebody down.
Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.
If you're a Democrat and 'The New York Times' is calling for your head, you know it's time for an exit strategy.
Twitter is not a business. I know its founders would like to think it is. It is, for the most part, a diversion.
I don't claim any moral or ethical high ground, but I also have chosen not to run for public office. Shouldn't there be a higher standard of conduct for public officials?
There's only one way we're going to change our political climate and ensure we establish some respect in our discourse. And that is to show there is a real price to pay for being a disrespectful partisan idiot.
I prefer for government to err toward less regulation, lower taxation, and free markets. And I'm a radical free trader.
The problem with State of the Union speeches is that they are, by their nature and design, alphabet soup. It's hard to know what a president really cares about when they run down a laundry list and check every issue box under the sun for fear they will offend some constituency if they don't.
Politics at bottom is not all that complicated. It's all about timing.
Politics only makes the difficult challenge of marriage even harder, with the demands of the job and the public spotlight it casts on a union.
Every president becomes a caricature. The press, partisans, late-night shows, and other arbiters of our culture these days boil down complicated and multi-faceted personalities into one-dimensional punchlines.
Wind and solar power are land-intensive, a green sin, but not energy-dense, and affordable only when heavily subsidized. And wind power must be supplemented with hydrocarbons for reliability.
For most of my life, I've considered myself a political centrist.
I'm saying it loud: I'm a Republican who supports gay rights.
Donors, like voters, increasingly expect candidates to exercise fiscal discipline.
The GOP cannot expect to win the presidency in the future by simply relying on running up big numbers with white voters.
Party switching has all the emotional edges and baggage of divorce.
The No Child Left Behind Act will be one of President Bush's enduring legacies. And it was engineered and inaugurated with a truly bipartisan coalition in Congress. Accountability, standards, and truly measuring student performance just makes sense. The only real debate about the law was and is whether or not it was adequately funded.
It's never popular among young people to be part of the establishment.
George W. Bush was president through some of the darkest days of our history and yet his optimism never waned. He is optimistic by nature, but he also understood the importance of always communicating a sense that things will get better.
Every day I am being told to sign up for Tumblr, Yammer, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Last.fm, ping.fm or the hot social-media tool du jour that happened to get mentioned on Mashable.com. It is like a social-media arms race. Each one of these new tools is like a cool new night club. Hot today, gone tomorrow, replaced with something else.
A Rick Santorum presidency would be very, very dangerous for America.
When elected officials and others contribute to a climate and culture that fosters hyper-partisanship, we've got to blow the whistle.
As history has repeatedly proven, one trade tariff begets another, then another - until you've got a full-blown trade war. No one ever wins, and consumers always get screwed.
People who know Paul Ryan say, 'He will be president one day.'
If you're running for office, it's tough to be an incumbent. It's tough to run out of Washington. It's better to be an outsider. And Establishment support doesn't help; it more likely hurts.
I'm amazed, as quirky, individual and selfish as most of us are, that anyone stays married for long.
As a husband and as a father of girls, I cannot imagine any woman in my family making the sacrifice of sanity required to run for office. The limited reward for public service cannot blunt the cost.
To open up new markets and create American jobs, we need to make global bilateral free trade agreements a priority as they were under the Clinton administration.
Sometime in the not too distant future, denying gays the right to marry will be viewed as historically corrupt - as corrupt as denying slaves their freedom.
