Mara Liasson Quotes

As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican and Democratic Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election. In recent times, each election year has seen each party's nominee selected - or at least subject to veto - by its most extreme wing and then forced to try to move back to the center before the general election. This can only undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of the candidates of both parties.

The American people as a whole are really pretty moderate. They're not, as a whole, conservative or liberal. The right wing is marching the Republican Party off a cliff.

I may not be the favourite candidate of some people within the Republican establishment, but the voters made a decision.

If anything, the Democrats' salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center.

I talked for a long time about that, what I call the hate wing of the Republican Party.And often been criticized for saying it. But there is such a thing, and it started in 1968 with the southern strategy developed by Richard Nixon to bring southern racists out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party, which they succeeded in doing.

Parties and political systems used to be about excluding renegades who would never play well with others in government. Now it's actually systematically screening them in.

The Republican Party is the party of national security. There's hardly a national security wing of the Democratic Party anymore. So if we turn away from it, that'll be a big problem.

The Republican Primaries were quite interesting. The establishment had its candidate, [Mitt] Romney, a kind of a Wall Street lawyer and investor, and they wanted him in. But the base didn't want him.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

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.

The Democratic Party was always there on crime, but in the past we let the ideologues on the left dominate. The Republicans may still let the ideologues on the right dominate.

It is hard to imagine a choice more stark than the choice between Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican Party, a clear establishment figure, and Stephen Bannon, a leader of the right-wing, the guy - Breitbart News Network, somebody who spent most of the time beating up on the Republican establishment.

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.

I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

We have a two-party system: The Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.

On domestic policy, one of the major stories in American politics has been the growing ideological and political self-confidence of the Democratic Party, and the growing ideological and political pessimism of the Republican Party.

David Roberts, who is a writer at Vox who I like, had a line about the voter - your voters weren't locked in the room with you, Republican establishment. You were locked in the room with them.

The genius of the Republicans has been how they figured out how to so polarize the middle class that we vote against our own best interests.

There are no moderate Republicans left, with the exception of a few who would vote with us when it doesn’t make any difference,” Frank said. “It’s the most rigid ideological party since before the Civil War. … The bumper sticker I’m going to have printed up for Democrats this year is, ‘We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.’

Parties that are majority parties are incoherent parties.

In fact the communists gained strength in India when the people thought my party was moving to the right. And they were correct.

Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.

Donald Trump is a candidate who divided his own party more deeply than any presidential candidate has before.

Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.

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