Top 131 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Kornacki - Page 2

The occasional nomination of a Todd Akin or Christine O'Donnell or Sharron Angle is a problem for the GOP. But it's really just a symptom of a much more serious malady: an environment on the right that demands and rewards an ideal of 'purity' that has little appeal outside of the conservative movement.

The Romney who showed up at CPAC in early 2007 vehemently embraced the conservative cause and openly mocked his home state and its liberal reputation.

My favorite player, all-time, will always be Doug Flutie.

I can multiply. Long divisions start to be a stretch.

In a gesture to moderate Republicans, Reagan put Bush on his '80 ticket, and Bush recognized that the Reagan crowd was rapidly becoming an overwhelming majority in the party. So he adjusted his views, served Reagan loyally and spent much of his vice presidency using his stature to convince conservative leaders they could trust him.

Richard Nixon built his presidency on his notorious 'Southern strategy.'

History will always regard Florida as the state that decided the Bush-Gore contest, but if Gore had carried Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, West Virginia or Kentucky - all states that his boss won twice - then he'd have won the election anyway.

History suggests that the opportunity to run again for the presidency four years after losing is reserved for those who exceeded expectations their first time out - not for the John Connallys of politics.

There's been no end to the grief Mitch McConnell's taken for his declaration early in Barack Obama's first term that his party's top goal was to make Obama a one-term president.

Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky's Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration's supposed 'war on coal' is a big factor too.

Through the years, through my own conversations, through my own weird obsessions, I think I have developed some very deep politics of political knowledge - and I think I have huge blind spots, too - which I have tried to build not necessarily through traditional interviews so much as it is conversations and a lot of research and reading.

The Tea Party was really a two-front war - one against Obama, the other against any Republican politician who reeked of insiderdom or insufficient purity.

The early favorite for the GOP nomination and 'natural' heir to Reagan was Vice President George H.W. Bush. But Bush was an imperfect fit for the party's base.

Romney's Obama-era CPAC struggles spoke to a challenge his '12 campaign never overcame: to shore up the GOP's restive conservative base in a way that would allow him to pivot to the middle in pursuit of general election voters.

Republicans have used the filibuster to turn the Senate into a de facto 60-vote body.

Romney and CPAC were never a particularly good match.

Governorships and Senate seats are the most common stepping-stone offices for presidential campaigns, and U.S. House seats are the most common stepping-stone positions for statewide campaigns.

Prior to civil rights, the Democratic Party had been defined by an increasingly untenable alliance of ideological opposites - integrationist Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman teamed with Southern segregationists like Richard Russell and John Stennis.

Compared to the '88 GOP race, the Democratic fight to succeed Clinton was orderly and drama-free. In the formative days of the campaign, Vice President Al Gore seemed at least potentially vulnerable.

I want to thank Chris Hayes and his team for creating a totally original and incredibly smart model for political television.

Newt Gingrich's rhetorical tics are well-known - his fondness for the word 'frankly,' his eagerness to frame even the most mundane development in dramatic world-historical terms, and his eagerness to accuse his enemies of practicing 'machine' politics.

There is huge money to be made - by candidates, by book publishers, by merchandise peddlers - from small-dollar conservative consumers who are as enraged by their own party's establishment as they are the Obama White House.

Numerous candidates lose their first White House race and try again four years later - but all of them do so after running surprisingly well the first time. No one ever talked about John Connally or Phil Gramm running again.

The lesson I take from TV is the less rehearsed it is, the more natural it's going to seem. Don't overthink it. It seems to work enough for me, and I'll just keep doing it.

The Founders surely never imagined that a three-fifths majority would be the standard requirement for passing legislation in the upper chamber, and for most of American history it wasn't. But filibuster use skyrocketed in 1993, when Republicans found themselves locked out of the White House and big Democratic congressional majorities.

I almost flunked pre-calculus back in high school.

Exactly why Democrats were crushed in the '94 midterms is impossible to say.

With writing, obviously you can really take the time to crack what you're going to say and build to a big point.

When it comes to gay marriage, the electorate can be broken into three basic groups: a relatively small core of committed opponents; a relatively small core of committed supporters; and a vast swath of conflicted voters who like to think of themselves as 'tolerant,' but who are instinctively uneasy with sudden, sweeping change.

For more than a decade after the 2000 election, leading Democrats ran from their gun control past and bent over backward to assuage the fears of gun owners.

The godfather of the modern Mississippi Republican Party, Charles Pickering, left the Democrats in 1964 because the party's national convention agreed to seat two black delegates.

Favorite-son candidates almost always win their states decisively in presidential elections. But their status as national celebrities can end up breeding fatigue and resentment among home-state voters when the election is over.

When the two have crossed paths in public, McCain hasn't even tried to mask his ill will toward Obama.

We've seen senators like Ted Cruz before. The historical comparison most commonly invoked involves Joe McCarthy, whose scurrilous red-baiting crusade in the early 1950s shattered the careers of innocent public servants and alienated McCarthy from his fellow senators, but also made him a folk hero on the right. Jesse Helms comes to mind too.

My first job in journalism was covering politics in New Jersey.

Walter Mondale was dissuaded from running for the Senate from Minnesota in 1990, in part out of fear that his 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 had reduced his standing.

I have a specialization in a very particular area: the presidential primary process.

Typically, the view of party leaders is that primaries are best avoided. Better to coalesce around a consensus candidate early, help that candidate amass a mighty bankroll, and focus the attention of volunteers, activists and other stakeholders on the general election.

Mr. Giuliani's liabilities as a G.O.P. candidate were obvious. There was his well-documented history of cultural liberalism - on abortion, gay rights, immigration and gun control - which he tried, unsuccessfully, to mask. And then there was his style - bland, uninspiring, even soporific.

By 1996, Clinton was able to run for re-election on the strength of what the '93 budget had delivered - and to taunt the Republicans (including his opponent, Bob Dole) for having been so afraid of it.

I don`t know how it would have gone, but I do know this - Mitt Romney was looking at running and the reason he decided not to run was because he decided that someone was unbeatable. That someone was Jeb Bush.

He [Donald Trump] found that sweet spot in the Republican Party, just politically, where you had the rest of the party saying it`s just impractical. You can`t deport 11 million people. You can`t round them up and deport them, and his position was basically, hey, Republican voters. Don`t listen them, you can and I will.

Rush Limbaugh is saying he never took Trump seriously in the first place.

I`m going to say the New England Patriots fans [biggest winner of the year 2015]. I mean - bring it on. Bring it on. You know why? You know why? Because we won the Super Bowl, because we got Brady reinstated because we started 10 and 0. Bring on the heat because you can`t beat us.

I think three weaknesses have emerged for Hillary Clinton in early states.One is young voters. Another is political independents. He`s winning with independents who show up. But the other one - this is the inverse of what we saw in `08 - working-class white voters. In 2008, they stuck with her all the way.

Here`s what I`m curious about. For the president of Mexico, this man, Donald Trump, is, it`s probably not an understatement to say, despised by many Mexicans.

The perception that Donald Trump has softened on immigration or is about to soften on immigration has some on the right concerned that he could lose support among his most loyal base of supporters, though he`d been drawn to his hard-line positions on immigration early in the campaign.

Donald Trump, I guess one idea here if he`s flip flopping, has he bought himself cover with his base by all the inflammatory thing he`s said over the last year? But the flip side is, all of those inflammatory things, the voters he`s trying to reach by flip flopping, are they tuned out to him because of that?

On the campaign trail, [Donald] Trump has threatened a trade war and repeatedly said that Mexico will pay for a wall on the Southern border.

Like the kind of voter who has been turned off to [Donald] Trump, who would normally vote Republican in an election like this, that`s who we`re talking about, can they get past - even if he comes to a position that`s more agreeable for them, a tone that`s more agreeable, can they get past the last year?

[Donald] Trump met with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, who has in the past compared Trump`s rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Looking to Donald Trump`s immigration speech can he hang onto his base if he softens his stance on the issue that got him this far?

This is a terrible year [2015] in a lot of ways. You have Paris. You have San Bernardino. But there was, if you remember the summer, there was that attempted terror attack on the train in France. There were two U.S. Marines, there`s one other guy. They were three guys who got up and who stopped that attack. Nobody died. They are heroes and they are my people of the year, three of them.

Probably not a surprise that, among the people of Mexico, just 4 percent say that they have a positive opinion of [Donald] Trump. Seventy-five percent say they have a negative opinion.

Hillary Clinton's weakest group, though, is people under 30, the young.

We played all that rhetoric, all of the thing - the provocative inflammatory things [Donald Trump] said over the last year, does that all add up to buying him enough wiggle room with his base that he can get out and change his position like that?

The Donald Trump who showed up at this press conference, though he did extend his hand to President Pena Nieto, say, I consider you a friend, he said he talked about first-generation, second- generation, third-generation Mexican-American, he said - his words here - he considers them beyond reproach.

There was a change in tone in terms of the [Donald] Trump who showed up in Mexico City for this press conference.

Here`s an interesting twist, though, President Pena Nieto later tweeting that he told [Donald] Trump in their private meeting that Mexico will not pay for the proposed border wall, Trump saying, though, in that press conference that it didn`t come up.

There's a difference between having a challenger whose name appears on the ballot and that`s pretty much it, versus having a challenger who forces you into uncomfortable positions, says some things about you that makes you defend yourself.