Quotes from Mark McKinnon

America as we know it will end unless we end Medicare as we know it.

I took a lot of heat from Republicans when I stepped out of John McCain's campaign after the 2008 primaries. I still supported McCain, and voted for him, but I just didn't want to be the tip of the spear attacking Obama.

You know, the Tea Party is a - first of all, it is a significant movement, and I think the media and some pundits have tried to write it off as a bunch of cranks or something. But, in fact, it's really a very legitimate and fairly significant swath of voters out there.

Marco Rubio is interesting because he checks so many boxes when you think about what a Republican nominee needs. He brings Florida, he's young, he's Hispanic, the Tea Party likes him. But that said, he's got issues, actually surprisingly, ironically, with Mexican-American voters.

Advocacy groups and voters are not wrong to push candidates to declare their position clearly on policy issues. That is good citizenship. Hard questions should be asked of every candidate, every politician. And those public servants should be prepared to answer, but in their own words.

Voters crave authenticity.

The GOP cannot expect to win the presidency in the future by simply relying on running up big numbers with white voters.

Donors, like voters, increasingly expect candidates to exercise fiscal discipline.

One thing is clear: Ron Paul defies labels.

People who know Paul Ryan say, 'He will be president one day.'

Wages, investments, and home values are the three legs of the economic stool for most Americans.

Life inside the Beltway bubble dulls your thinking.

Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

The world is still changing. Faster than ever. And so should the Republican Party. Or condemn itself to a smaller and smaller base of core supporters and permanent minority status.

I'm saying it loud: I'm a Republican who supports gay rights.

Go Hard or Go Home, but never go home hard!

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum.

Politics only makes the difficult challenge of marriage even harder, with the demands of the job and the public spotlight it casts on a union.

I prefer for government to err toward less regulation, lower taxation, and free markets. And I'm a radical free trader.

As history has repeatedly proven, one trade tariff begets another, then another - until you've got a full-blown trade war. No one ever wins, and consumers always get screwed.

Democracy is but an experiment in the long history of the world.

Washington doesn't have just a spending problem, or just an entitlement problem, or just a taxing problem. We have a leadership problem. Fix that, and the first three problems are solved.

What strikes me when I leave Washington is the extent to which there's a huge disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country. The rest of the country is not hyper partisan.