Dennis Ross Quotes

I can't give political advice to politicians.

I never had a political thought in my life until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon Presidential Campaign.

There is an apparatus set up to protect politicians, but those within that apparatus will have their own political views. I've got mates who are police officers and mates who are in the military, and they often have a very different view to the policy they're asked to carry out.

I don't have a particular go-to political blog.

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.

Mr. Gingrich's injunction represents the worst of American political discourse, which reached a low during the dispiriting presidential campaign of 1988. Then, more than ever before, negative argument displaced reasoned discussion about how a nation might best be governed. The sound bite reigned. Attack commercials flourished. The signs this year aren't any better. Evidence that negative campaigning can come back to sink the sender has had little impact. The races for governor in California and Texas have already seen the same slash and burn. No doubt the proceedings will grow more rabid still as November nears. Negative discourse serves democracy poorly. The temptation to avoid serious debate is already great. It increases as the stakes soar and slander becomes a rewarding, easy option. The issues of the day go untended. The whole affair takes on the character of the gladiator's art. The GOPAC glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence—the Republican whip in the House—and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document. The nakedness of the GOPAC offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear; the bald appeal to invective will certainly probe those limits. For now, it should be said that some adjectives in the glossary aptly describe the glossary itself: shallow, sensationalist, and, yes, shame(ful).

At a time when politics has become an almost minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign.

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.

You can learn a lot about Pat Buchanan by talking to his campaign staff, particularly the ones who have quit or been fired.

In terms of politics, I just look at people's policies, and sometimes I agree with something, sometimes I won't.

There's nothing that can shock me anymore, but at this point, Trump's made it very clear how his temperament is, how his personality is, what his level of intellectual depth is when it comes to policy, and he's made it abundantly clear that he's utterly unqualified to be president - no matter what your political views are.

Asking presidential candidates whether they support or would change past foreign policy decisions is the most common line of questioning among members of the media. It's also the most pointless.

It's fair to say that the policy and character of my government would be, or the government which I lead, would be very different to that of President Trump.

I am the foremost expert on what Cory Stewart believes.

I'll tell you where I stand on the issues, and then I'll let the pundits decide how to label me.

I can't see the point in being in politics if you're not yourself. If you're simply interested in implementing other people's policies, then you should become a civil servant. If you have ideas and some form of ideology, then it's exciting because you can argue forward.

I don't believe in populism.

No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals

I look upon myself as a politician. That isn't a dirty word.

Politics are the divine science, after all.

Bill Clinton was giving the Clinton campaign the best advice.

There was an analyst who came out the other day who's had a long track record of projecting presidential campaigns based on the economy and other kind of factors. And he said if [Donald] Trump stays about where he is right now, he'll win at about 51 or 52 percent. If Trump actually gets his act together in a disciplined way, he could win by as much as 66 percent.

Take like, say, Obama, he's called "liberal" and he's praised for his "principled objection to the Iraq war". What was his "principled objection"? He says it was a "strategic blunder," like Nazi generals after Stalingrad.

Rhetoric matters, but at the end of the day policy matters more.