Stuart Rothenberg Quotes

The Tea Party is not monolithic. There is a battle between people who care about liberty and the Constitution and the Republican Establishment who is trying to take ownership of it and redirect it for its own purposes.

The Democrats don't like the Tea Party because the Tea Party engineered their defeat. The Republicans, some members, don't like the Tea Party because the Tea Party illustrates what they have to do to win and they're not really comfortable with that.

It's tempting to remember that the Tea Party had a peak and then the Republican Party establishment sort of beat it back down. And so these things are won in a day.

It was a very different Republican Party in 2013. And so I think particularly the House Republicans are more confrontational, less willing to compromise even than the Republican class of '94.

I would like to think that we have made much more progress, that we've come much further, to have someone like a Donald Trump to emerge as the nominee of a major political party.

The Republican Party was just as scared of the Tea Party as the Democrats were. We just didn't know it at the time.

This looking down our noses at tea party people has got to stop.

I think we have got to get the Republicans and the Democrats to get back to what I call the fiscal conservative, the issues that drive the tea parties.

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons that have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.

Remember, the left corrupts everything, folks. The Democrat Party, the left corrupts every institution. They politicize it, and by virtue of that alone they corrupt it. And so at the NSA, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, at the CIA, and at the FBI, there are Obamaites, there are people that think like he.

We've seen the Republican Party come apart at the seam with Donald Trump taking the remnants over the cliff. We've seen the basic foundation of the Republican Party move into the Democratic Party inside of Hillary's campaign.

I think this is a moment where Donald Trump recognized the Republican establishment was much weaker, the party leaders were much weaker than they thought they were in terms of being able to dictate any outcomes.

I think it's interesting that people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi said that the Tea Party was dead and they weren't influential and yet they're still talking about the Tea Party.

Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.

Parties that are majority parties are incoherent parties.

I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell's Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk. And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I'm surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I'm worried that you're a big government guy.

I am very optimistic about the long run prospects for democracy in China. Chinese society is being dramatically and rapidly transformed. And there’s rising evidence that the new generation not only lacks faith in communism anymore, they think it’s a joke. They’re very cynical about their leadership and they want democratic change.

The shouting, the overrunning of the Capitol, the sneaking in of Tea Party participants into the basement of the Capitol, the name-calling, the spitting, all of that... The Tea Party emerges as not only outrageous, but they have turned up the volume in ways that even Code Pink have not been able to do.

Tea Party has now cost the Republicans 5 senate seats. My next donation is going to them.

I do think what the Tea Party also had was Obamacare and the unpopularity of that, at least at the time. And so whether there is something that is equally unpopular and equally galvanizing that is almost self-destructive from the administration, that's another factor that we will wait and see.

The presidency has even become a partisan thing. The presidency has been totally politicized and totally made partisan, as evidenced by the IRS going after the Tea Party and any number of other examples I give you.

I think that the Democratic Party has been ill served by identity politics. I think that ironically evangelicals have now bought into the same mistake. They have discovered allies in the white supremacist movement. I think this is a heavy price to pay and will in the end accelerate the departure from religion by young people.

The left wants to transform America away from founding ideals, and this is it. And they know it. And they're doing everything they, and they've got the media helping them and so forth. I think one of the ways of exposing 'em is to ridicule 'em. I mean, laughter is the simplest way to humiliate somebody. Laugh at them, it shrinks them.

I do great with Tea Party, I do great with conservatives I do great with moderates, I do great with evangelicals, I do great with everybody.

How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote?