Mark McKinnon Quotes
The world is still changing. Faster than ever. And so should the Republican Party. Or condemn itself to a smaller and smaller base of core supporters and permanent minority status.
McKinnon, Mark. "Change or Die: The GOP's Choice." The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 18 Mar. 2013.
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.
The liberals of the Republican party had been the powerful and often dominant wing of the party since Theodore Roosevelt had instituted his reformism. Rockefeller was trying to maintain its preeminence inside the party against the then new Republican extremists led by Barry Goldwater. He lost at the convention, as Goldwater was nominated as the Presidential candidate. He was trounced in the general election because of his extreme form of Conservatism. However, while the extreme right wingers lost the election, they had won control of the Republican Party that defined Republicanism for decades thereafter as a conservative movement. They would make “liberalism” a dirty word, and the party did not concern itself with human need much thereafter while fighting the change and globalization that was beginning.
The Tea Party faction of the Republican Party was opposed to government doing much of anything other than Defense and Foreign Policy. The regular Republicans saw a much more extensive and robust role of government though few did so to the extent of Abraham Lincoln and the other founders of the Republican Party. The Tea Party faction, although in the minority of the Republican Caucus really controlled the Congressional Caucus by their tactics of trashing any Republicans who had views or voted differently from them, and intimidated the other faction by Running Tea Party candidates against the fellow Republicans in the Primary elections.
Mark McKinnon is an American political advisor, reform advocate, media columnist and television producer. He was the chief media advisor to five successful presidential primary and general election campaigns, and is a co-founder of No Labels, an organization dedicated to bipartisanship and political problem solving. He served as vice chairman of Public Strategies, Inc., which was acquired by the international communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton Strategies, and was president of Maverick Media. McKinnon is the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Showtime's The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth and consulted on the HBO series The Newsroom and Netflix's House of Cards. He was a regular columnist for The Daily Beast and The Daily Telegraph (London).
