Charlie Crist Quotes

Lecture, FDR Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY, June 24, 2006

One of the reasons that Reagan was so popular and effective was the he was positive and civil in his public and political relations. Although he was clearly conservative, he worked very well with the Democrats in Congress and in the state. The Republican Party after Reagan had become totally negative and offered nothing positive and specific. Lack of comity and much nastiness had become the Republican legislative style and on Radio and TV the nastiness rivaled that of McCarthyism. Conservatives like Graham who were civil and polite to Democrats and everyone else, were actually castigated and attacked by other Republican leaders and spokespeople.

This quotation shows American tolerance and freedom of speech even for our head of state.

The Republican party had lurched so far to the right, that a Republican like Reagan could never win the nomination even though he could likely win a national election.

At the time, the prevailing federal policy was to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Lincoln was intent on keeping Kentucky and Maryland, both slave states, in the union, even at the cost of returning fugitive slaves. Shortly after, he came up with the policy of always returning fugitive slaves except in the rebellious states of the confederacy where the slaves were legally defined as ‘contraband’—war material, and thus could be seized by Union forces. Many fugitive slaves were thus employed by the Union for construction projects. Later, the Emancipation Proclamation set the slaves of the Confederacy free.

When Dole was the Republican Congressional Leader, the Republican Party had a spectrum of liberals and conservatives and Dole was considered to be at the conservative side. However, right wing extremists first gained much influence in the party and then gained control. They then tried to purge the party of those Republicans who were not as far right as they were and were successful in many cases. Liberal Republicans found themselves isolated and tended to retire, become independents, or switch parties. This drove the party even further to the right stimulating Dole’s quip.

One-liner, soundbytes, have been good political oratory long before TV

At the time of this quotation, Thompson was campaigning for the Republican Presidential Nomination for which he did not make a good showing in the primaries.

The letter was written in the supposed style of a Black after Emancipation and includes most of the ugly false stereotypes of the worst of the racists of the present and the slaveowners of past times. Williams stated that he was not a racist and was trying to make a point about freedom required risk and responsibility. However, the effort was interpreted by many people, Black and white, to be insulting and a put down of African Americans. At the same time, although most of the Tea Party members were not racists, most of the racists in America were supporters of the Tea Party. Those people interpreted the quotation as "telling it like it is" about Blacks who do not want the responsiblities and risks of freedom and are not yet developed sufficiently to be equal citizens in a democracy.

The logic of Southern secession made so little sense to most Northerners, that they assumed that after the election, the Southern threats of treason and rebellion would stop. Most Northerners did not appreciate that Southerners had little economic vision absent slavery and could not imagine how they could survive. For the Northerners, they had seen great economic growth with free labor and no slavery. But most Southerners were ignorant of the possibilities except for the few very wealthy Southern families who had seen the North and England. They realized that the South could make it economically, but they whose total fortunes came from the ownership value of slaves, might not be in their exalted positions without slavery. At the time, the value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, mines, and farms of the South.

The Republicans had lost the 1960 Presidential election narrowly with the moderate wing of the party in control. Goldwater argued that to win, the appeal must be much more conservative and that what characterized the campaign with the right wing of the party in control. This time, the Republicans were trounced by one of the largest margins in history.

Gingrich was one of the most polarizing political figures of his era. He conflated liberals with intellectuals, and people he called “elites” creating a form of class warfare where the class divisions were educational and cultural instead of socioeconomic.

In the Republican Presidential Primary Election of 2012, Mitt Romney was one of 9 candidates. After a very bitter campaign Romney won, but he could never appeal sufficiently to his own party to get close to 50 percent of the Republicans to support him. However, that was more than any of the other 8 candidates. Hence he was the Republican Nominee despite the fact that he never obtained majority support. Thus Turner called him the Republican “Default Candidate”.

The concept of emancipation was so unthinkable to most Southern leaders that Lee was convinced that the Lincoln policies of emancipation would split the North and unseat Lincoln and his Republicans. While there were Northerners who objected to emancipation it in general, most saw it as a great blow to the then hated South, which made it tolerable. At the same time most Northerners approved of emancipation for the blow to the South, the moral end to slavery and/or the end of free labor having to compete with slave labor. The Southern mentality on slavery blinded most to the unreality of their prospects and strategies of the entire secession and war. Lee’s argument echoed that made by most of the confederates which is a classic logical hypocrisy. Emancipation of slaves was a great restriction on the rights and liberties of the slave owners of the South. They demanded the freedom and liberty to deny freedom and liberty to many more people than they, so that they could have the rights to their “property” while the would deny the slaves the rights to their own. bodies, souls and families,