Tony Blankley Quotes
You win elections with coalitions. You don't win elections by ideologically cleansing your party.
Tony Blankley, Press Secretary to the Speaker of the House (Republican), California Deputy Attorney General (Republican), Journalist, CNBC, Hardball, 1999
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While all the traditional Democratic interest groups supported Mondale, the average voters were not so enthusiastic. The Democrats lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan. The interest groups in the base of each party can help increase the turnout for a candidate or sit on their hands and suppress it. But if the individual voters are not generally enthused for a candidate, the interest groups cannot deliver a win in a presidential election.
Republican Party primary elections had become very contentious. The radical right and the Tea Party, though a minority of the party, had the power to destroy almost any Republican candidate’s chances. So those Republican political candidates were forced to pander to the extreme right and then try and backtrack to the center for the general election. As a result, few people believed the statements of Republican office seekers as no one knew what they really believed including members of their own party, Bush, no longer running for any political position, found himself with much more credibility and influence in the party than those who were running for office. The problem of appealing to party extremes was not unique to the Republicans at that time, but the degree and extent was unprecedented accounting for the distrust.
Anthony David "Tony" Blankley was an American political analyst who gained fame as the press secretary for Newt Gingrich, the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years, and as a regular panelist on The McLaughlin Group. He later became an Executive Vice President with Edelman public relations in Washington, D.C. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow in National-Security Communications at the Heritage Foundation, a weekly contributor to the nationally syndicated public radio programme Left, Right & Center, the author of The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? and American Grit: What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century. He served as the editorial page editor for The Washington Times from 2002-2009.
