Andrew Ross Sorkin Quotes

The challenge has been, we make policy in the world of politics.

Obama is capable - as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.

The dominant color of politics is gray; difficult choices and compromise are required at almost every step of the journey toward a major new program.

Democracy and elections can be a double-edged sword … democratic competition and elections increase the politicians’ appetite for gaining public support by pleasing the public, which is sometimes led by emotional motives and short-sighted considerations. Populist politics can sometimes be driven by a lack of knowledge and is not always conducive to the real interest …

What Congress does is respond to pressures that are upon it.

All politics is a combination of rhetoric and reality.

You have the socialist parties ruling Denmark putting in conservative policies because the conservatives control the media and the public discourse.

What people demand is what the policies serve.

Because the task of a political leader is to do what he believes is better for his country. Sometimes the public opinion is in favor; sometimes the public opinion needs a little bit more time to understand things.

'2016' is based on an experiment: what if you let Obama do it himself? That experiment is necessarily limited because I'm not factoring in a Republican House, a Supreme Court or the tug of public opinion.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

Johnson showed me how important it was to use every hour of every day to shape national policy while we had the power to do so.

What matters is not a simple sense of an issue’s salience, but whether a government can shape outcomes on it, where there is the greatest likelihood that the parties will actually be able to implement their policies.

Legislative proposals are not merely vehicles for expressing policy, they are devices for getting policy decided.

Sometimes political parties have a very short window to influence public policy

[The governor] has chosen to follow political advice rather than medical advice.

For elites, the politics of governing is seen as a continual struggle to manage public emotions so that they do not overwhelm sound public policy.

The highest reach of a news-writer is an empty reasoning on policy, and vain conjectures on the public management.

Political Necessity!!!

Highly popular and unpopular Presidents do not engage in policy pandering.

A lot of folks look at the political calculation and then determine the policy. I think that's backward.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention.

We think the government is running the country, but it is just a policymaker. Unknowingly, people are inviting the government to run their lives. The only business of the government is to come up with the right policies.

I told New Jerseyans that I would find ways to work for commonsense, bipartisan solutions to some of our greatest challenges.