Political Paradigm Quotes

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between left or right. Well, I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down.

The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They've convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse.

Political assumptions can remain constant for long periods and then change very quickly.

There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision - global democratic revolution - into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

Maybe Bernie [Sanders] lost his perspective because he became a part of the Washington culture. Maybe it's a generational thing.

My problem with Obama is that he's not a new paradigm; he's an old paradigm. A new paradigm would be somebody like Harold Ford [former Democratic Congressman from Tennessee] or Michael Steele [former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland], no relation, both of whom present themselves as individuals, and don't seem to wear a mask. They don't 'bargain;' they don't 'challenge.' So, I see them as fresh, and as evidence of what I hope will be a new trend.

President Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement. He had the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in this country - schools that train you how to run the political paradigm, not challenge it. The leaders of the Black Power Movement were challenging that paradigm.