Paul Wellstone Quotes

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.

I am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.

Let me put it this way: I think Republicans tend to keep the ball in play, Democrats go for broke.

A liberal Republican is a contradiction in terms ... a moderate Republican is a liberal who doesn't like to call himself a liberal.

I was never a Democrat but there are some Republicans who think I ought to be.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

I joined a Republican Party that was used to losing, used to being browbeaten by the Democrats. I represent a totally different style.

At the end of the day, Democrats go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far left; Republicans go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far right. Hey, there's a big middle ground here that's not represented. I think that, Bill Weld and myself, I think the Libertarian Party really occupies that ground.

Republicans are being counseled to move the party to the left, but in my experience, those who advocate more liberal policies for the GOP are wrongheaded or Democrats, or both.

If the [Republican] party wants to have an ideological debate, it's never going to win anything in a major way.

The Republican Party does not want to defeat Democrats.

I have no problem if you want to be a socialist. But for those people who are in the middle, you know, I don't know if you're really welcome in the Democratic Party, and I don't even know who the Republican Party is anymore. I have absolutely no idea.

The Republican Party, right now, is a conservative populist party.

I see myself as a small 'l' liberal, but not coalition liberal, necessarily.

I've always believed in challenging Republicans where they think they are strongest.

A government full of Democrats would rather have you be a Republican, and a government full of Republicans would rather have you be a Democrat, than have you oppose both.

I don't intend to leave the Republican Party, but I would like to move the Republican Party more to the center.

Now, most of the time I'm going to agree with the Democrats and disagree with the Republicans.

You've got the brain-washed, that's the Democrats, and the brain-dead, that's the Republicans!

I say Republicans aren't right all the time. Democrats aren't wrong all the time - now, maybe most of the time, but not all the time.

You can make an argument that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative or a Republican. Bill's kind of unpredictable. Somebody might say that he would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of Scoop Jackson.

I think my message goes out to the entire spectrum of political parties. I'm supported by the Tea Party, the Conservative Party and the Republican Party. I come from a Democratic world. My world is moderate Democrats, Reagan-type Democrats if you want, the blues or whatever you call them, the Blue Dogs. That's been my world, historically.

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.

Republicans are the party of 'no,' and Democrats are the party of 'don't know' because it hasn't fought for bold ideas, policies, or plans to turn us in a new direction.