Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Schmidt

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Steve Schmidt.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Steve Schmidt

Stephen Edward Schmidt is an American communications and public affairs strategist who worked on Republican political campaigns, including those of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arizona Senator John McCain. Schmidt was the senior campaign strategist and advisor to McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. He pushed McCain to select Sarah Palin as his running mate, a choice which Schmidt came to regret.

We have 57 choices of ketchup and 500 TV channels. Very nearly everything has been disrupted in the country, from how we buy groceries to how we consume news, except for the system that produces the political leadership of the country.
For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.
For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground. — © Steve Schmidt
For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.
It's gratifying to work for somebody who doesn't measure accomplishment by the temporary state of public-opinion polls.
I've been involved in a lot of victories and I've been involved in defeats.
There's never been an era absent of demagogues.
What destroyed the Republican Party isn't Trump. It's the obedience to Trump from servile leaders like McConnell and Ryan who could have put a check on him. They have gotten their place in political history. They'll be remembered as vile.
I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly.
I would find it difficult to be involved in an effort that I think disenfranchises people from a fundamental right. How do you work with people who are opposed to marriage equality? I don't want to do it.
My role in Palin is something that there's not a day that has gone by that I don't have regret about.
This is not Trumpistan.
I've certainly done more than my fair share of pouncing on a stupid issue to win the news cycle of the day, to distract from what are real and important issues.
A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong. — © Steve Schmidt
A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong.
A lot of people like me who worked in Republican politics had a personal set of beliefs on issues that were at variance with the candidates that we worked for.
When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Whether you're Democrat or Republican... you want everybody who's eligible to vote to vote, and that's how you want to win elections.
It's part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there's widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there's not.
Birtherism is a fringe issue that's way out of the mainstream, and it's disturbing when you see people you... have some level of respect for, whether it's members of Congress or even Donald Trump, falling into that category.
Elections are about the voters who vote in them.
The reality is that our Founders always predicted that one day there would be a president like Trump, and that's why they designed the system of government the way they designed it.
As a conservative myself that, you know, generally I would have a point of view that less regulation is better than more regulation, but less regulation shouldn't supersede a tax on the fundamentally important institutions that sustain a democratic republic.
The government is corrupted. It's corrupted. It is not about regular people.
The country badly needs to have a right-of-center political party, grounded in traditional values that the Republican Party represented till it didn't.
If you hang around politics long enough, you tend to get disappointed by people.
I think that more and more Americans are insistent that, at a minimum, gay couples should be treated with respect and when they see a political party trying to stigmatize a group of people who are hardworking, who play by the rules, who raise decent families, they're troubled by it.
It's not just that there's no other spokesperson for the executive seat of power in a democratic republic anywhere in the world where you see that type of lying. It's that there's never been a spokesman for the executive seat in power who is such a prolific liar as Sarah Sanders.
Howard Schultz is a hell of a man, a hell of a leader.
Trump makes no pretense about being the commander in chief of all of the country, being president of all of the people, including the people who voted against him. He is, in effect, a tribal chieftain who has declared war on half of the country.
I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.
To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won't share a party label with people who think it's all right to put babies in internment camps.
Liberal democracy is in regression all over the world, and it's a dangerous thing.
If you want to oppose Trump, the first thing you should do is say, 'I'm not going to do one thing that makes it worse.' Because making it worse helps Trump. Part of the damage of this era is his debasement and his purposeful divisions. That's unique in all of history.
I love little kids, I hate little kids being used by cynical politicians, though.
Your average Republican member of Congress, if you played a word association game with them and said, 'Latino,' they're going to respond 'illegal immigrant,' as opposed to 'sergeant major' or 'surgeon' or 'professor.'
Politicians have an acutely honed instinct for self-preservation.
My fidelity is to my country, not my political party. Country first.
Trump is what the Russians call a useful idiot, someone in service to the Russian Federation, either unwitting or wittingly.
I've spent my life in the Republican party, it gives me no pleasure to say this. This party has demonstrated a complete incapacity to govern. Period. — © Steve Schmidt
I've spent my life in the Republican party, it gives me no pleasure to say this. This party has demonstrated a complete incapacity to govern. Period.
I don't want to sit here and disparage Paul Ryan the man, because he's a good guy. He's a moral person. He's a decent person.
Trump was legitimized by birtherism, and he was abetted by a billion-dollar incitement industry.
But I'm not particularly aligned with the Democratic Party's policy agenda.
Mitch McConnell has, as much as anyone, done great damage to the United States Senate as an institution that was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.
I profoundly believe that the Democratic Party is the only vehicle we have to put a check on Donald Trump.
One of the things that is for sure unique, we have never seen in this country a billion dollar propaganda industry in full service and in absolute control of an administration in the way that FOX News is.
Whether they're for good or bad, all trends in the United States start in California.
I do think there is every potential in 2010 and 2012 to begin to see independent candidates who are capturing a significant percentage of the vote and even win.
Politics always fascinated me. In my 20s, I was involved in politics and, as I look in the mirror, not for the noblest of purposes. It was for sport.
I just want to say about Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum, I mean, every superhero has to have the right nemesis. And for Beto O'Rourke, he's been very lucky in his choice of oppositional villains to run against.
I think it's important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.
One of the things I'm keen on doing is really revealing the degree to which the conservative movement, and by extension the Republican Party, has become a racket. — © Steve Schmidt
One of the things I'm keen on doing is really revealing the degree to which the conservative movement, and by extension the Republican Party, has become a racket.
Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century. What does 21st-century conservatism look like?
So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It's over. It doesn't exist anymore.
The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.
Great Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that everyone`s entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. I`m not sure that`s true anymore.
In a social media age, it seems that everyone lives in their own reality and that when you give consideration to Newt Gingrich, he exists in an alternate reality, at some level, where the things he says are so diametrically opposed to the record.
John Kerry's newfound interest in fiscal discipline is a political gimmick that defies his 20-year record in the Senate and stands in stark contrast to his reckless and expansive promises of new government spending on the campaign trail.
There are change elections and there are 'more of the same' elections, and there was a lot of economic anxiety in the 1992 election and (Bill Clinton) was able to drive a change narrative. after eight years of Barack Obama, it's very difficult to understand what kind of change it is that Hillary Clinton's candidacy could represent.
Look, this CPAC convention is increasingly the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement. All that’s missing from that convention is a couple of Wookies.
That could be the issue that the party - that the party faces as we get ready to potentially nominate someone who`s utterly unelectable in a general election contest.
Even in the face of continued good news, Kerry clings to his message of gloom and doom, supporting it with twisted statistics. Kerry's complaints about a middle class squeeze are out of touch with the reality that home sales hit a record high last month, college tuition increases slowed and consumer confidence is rising.
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