Quotes from John Heilemann

If you think all these terrible things about Obama, he asked the woman, how can you possibly be undecided? Because if McCain dies, Palin would be president, she said.

We are the makers of history, not its victims.

At that moment, though, she stood there on stage, perched atop a pair of ruby-red heels, looking less like Eliza Doolittle than Dorothy; the girl swept up in the cyclone, lifted out of her black-and-white world and deposited in a Technicolor Oz.

in 2010, a University of Alabama scientist gunned down six of her colleagues. Here's what made Amy Bishop snap.

For one month, Evan Ratliff shed his identity and tried to disappear.

Keep your head down. Avoid the limelight. Get on the right committees. Go to hearings. Do your homework. Build up a substantive portfolio. And never forget the care and feeding of the people who sent you here.

Three days later, after the Chris Cox episode, a friend emailed Obama asking what he thought explained McCain's wild swings and oscillations. "No fucking discipline," Obama replied. As

FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!" McCain let out the stream of sharp epithets, both middle fingers raised and extended, barking in his wife's face. He was angry; she had interrupted him. Cindy burst into tears, but, really, she should have been used to it by now.

He had just gotten word that the apocalypse was nigh.

Most puzzling was his timidity. Giuliani was supposed to be a tough guy, but in the face of attacks by his opponents, his performance had been as limp as an overcooked Chinatown noodle.

John Kerry was saddled with more baggage than a curbside porter at Dulles airport.

For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama, guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.

I don't know who Donald Trump has in mind given that the circle of loyalists around him, the circle of people that he genuinely trusts is very small and getting smaller all the time.