Rick Perlstein Quotes & Sayings (Page 8)

“Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'”

“Part of the fantasy certain pro-reform Republicans like to broadcast about Hispanics, family-oriented, churchgoing traditionalists, is that they are somehow natural conservatives, just waiting for the Republicans to slough off the skin of bigotry before they can embrace Reaganism en masse just like every other ordinary God-fearing American.”

“Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.”

“Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.”

“Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President').”

“Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it.”

“Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.”

“Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.”

“Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.”

“Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so.”