Quotes from Joe Klein

Barack Obama's inspirational whoosh to the presidency in 2008 was unusual. Most campaigns are less exhilarating; indeed, they are downright disappointing - until someone wins.

I invented the psychological histories and the relationship between Jack and Susan Stanton. I didn't know anything about the Clintons. I don't know more about the Clintons' marriage than you do.

In point of fact, 'Simpson-Bowles' has become a symbol, or SimBowl, rather than an actual plan, political shorthand for the process of long-term deficit reduction.

This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.

I believe that poverty is often the result of inappropriate behavior - out-of-wedlock births, dropping out of school, crime and drugs - which should not be rewarded. But often it isn't, and common decency requires that we take care of the least of these.

I think that if you make a strong statement of principle, even if the folks disagree with you, people will respect you for it.

If he'd been negotiating Obamacare, Lincoln would have made the infamous 'Cornhusker Kickback' deal - $100 million in Medicaid funds for Nebraska to secure a Senator's vote - in a heartbeat, even if the press howled as it did when Barack Obama agreed to it, forcing its cancellation.

Bush the Elder's stature as president grows with every passing year. He was the finest foreign policy president I've ever covered and a man who defied his party on tax increases while imposing budget restrictions on the Democrats.

Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don't think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.

Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.

You know, when George Bush talks about freedom not being America's gift to world but God's gift to all humankind, it smells like market testing to me.

Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.

Thucydides: "Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

Faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness.

But Reich would eventually arrive at a more nuanced conclusion: "Bill Clinton operated by sonar. He emits a huge number of policies, ideas, and initiatives and he sees what kind if response he gets. And where he sees an opportunity to move, he moves.

Her inability to see my color—a quality that at first seemed so fetching in her, so exhilarating and optimistic—ultimately became a statement I could not accept: that my color wasn't important. It seemed she did not know me. It was unbearable.

Back in George W. Bush's second term, when diplomatic realism began to overtake foolish bellicosity, the president developed one of his patented nicknames for the two most powerful neoconservative journalists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer: he called them 'the Bomber Boys.'

For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.

You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.

You know, larger-than-life politicians have larger-than-life strengths and larger-than-life weaknesses.

If there was one fact that sent me hurtling off to write 'Politics Lost,' it was when I learned that John Kerry had focus-grouped Abu Ghraib. We knew about the Justice Department memo in June of 2004, and Kerry didn't raise that in any one of his three debates with George Bush.

If every American automatically has health coverage, the age at which Medicare kicks in becomes a less fraught issue. We could gradually raise the age of Medicare eligibility a bit, according to income, and save money.

There's a basic law, Klein's second, or third, or fourth law of politics in the TV age, which is warm always beats cold, with the exception of Richard Nixon. The nicer guy usually wins.