Quotes About Politics

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn't get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more—or maybe something different. Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.? Well

if that Watergate case ever gets into court, he might get very nervous.

Look what happened the last time a Republican president tried to fix a doomed national economy. Remember Herbert Hoover?

Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he's saying—even if it's all stone crazy.

The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems—much less come up with any honest solutions—but "the Fighting Little Judge" has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. Southern politicians are not made that way. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A

This is old politicians, says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern's operation in the North half of Milwaukee. We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That's the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we've got young people who work because they're interested in the issues.

This guy is the real thing," one of them said. "I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain't the same as the others. He don't sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it.

ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few TV spots—and every one of his rallies attracted more people than the halls could hold.

Secondly, instead of competing with Muskie and Humphrey, I was then competing with Nixon, the author of the Southern strategy and the guy who hammered hard against those who were dissenters on the war and hammered on amnesty and busing and those things, so that it was a different type of competition than I had with Muskie and Humphrey in Wisconsin.

What election?" he asked. "Never mind," I said. "I was only kidding." One

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that.

He never stooped to trying to sell us on stupidities about electability and realism, or the pitfalls of purity. Instead, he stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw - probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but he benefit to is was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway… and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering—to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish—just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said.

Omnibus Safe Streets & Crime Control Act of 1968, a genuinely

Getting barred from the White House is like being blackballed at the Playboy Club. There are definite advantages to having your name on the Ugly List in places like that.

McGovern has made it painfully clear that he wants more than just the nomination; he has every intention of tearing the Democratic Party completely apart and re-building it according to his own blueprint…

But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Democratic Party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled "another Goldwater" and stripped of any power in the party.

Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.

But Muskie was the one who could beat Nixon or unite the party or was the clear leader—or any of those other phrases of antiquity.

Muskie is already finished," he said then. "He had no base. Nobody's really for Muskie. They're only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he's the only one who can beat Nixon—but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn't even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.

Newt Gingrich had his victory, too. Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994? Now the only people who still have any respect for it are cops, preachers, and creeps who hang out on the fringes of Klan rallies and worship Charlton Heston.

If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician -- any politician -- and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window ... flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high powered Ball Buster cattle prod.

Suhrawardy, who was barred from politics by Ayub Khan, challenged the concept of Pakistan as an ideological state. Emphasis on ideology, he argued, "would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.