Quotes About Politics

But at no stage in my political career had I made environmental issues my calling card. Not because I didn't consider them important but because for my constituents, many of whom were working-class, poor air quality or industrial runoff took a backseat to the need for better housing, education, healthcare, and jobs. I figured somebody else could worry about the trees.

how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in, a way to explain the different strands of my mixed-up heritage, and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.

What I knew was that he was a spectacle, and in the United States of America in 2011, that was a form of power. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day. The same reporters who laughed at my jokes would continue to give him airtime. Their publishers would vie to have him sit at their tables. Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he'd peddled, he in fact had never been bigger.

We won't be doing anything to protect the environment," Plouffe had barked when questioned by a group of advocates, "if we lose Ohio and Pennsylvania!" —

was a clever idea, and one with enough traction that Nancy Pelosi had included it in the House bill. But on the Senate side, we were nowhere close to having sixty votes for a public option.

Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart.

a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

I had never intended the book to serve as a campaign manifesto; I just wanted to present my ideas about the current state of American politics in an interesting way and sell enough copies to justify my sizable advance.

CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business.

that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn't be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign - and by extension a democracy - proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

However, the politics didn't fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on construction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.

was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

Still, it wasn't until February 10, 2011, the day before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt, that this absurd theory really got traction. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Trump hinted that he might run for president, asserting that "our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy.

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I'd

My anger when a young Kerry staffer informed us that I had to cut one of my favorite lines because the nominee intended to poach it for his own speech.

But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives.

This idea of purity and you're never compromised, you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.

That was politics in Springfield: a series of transactions mostly hidden from view, legislators weighing the competing pressures of various interests with the dispassion of bazaar merchants, all the while keeping a careful eye on the handful of ideological hot buttons—guns, abortion, taxes—that might generate heat from their base.

Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man's certainty always threatened another's.

the broader question of shared values—the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics

He ticked off the "four factions" he believed were behind the protests: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Hamas. Neither of these leaders' analyses stood up to scrutiny.

Il n'y a aucune raison que la politique soit nécessairement conforme à l'image que s'en font les gens. Ca peut être autre chose.

In their view, we'd compromised too much, and by continually chasing the false promise of bipartisanship, we'd not only empowered McConnell and squandered big Democratic majorities; we'd thrown a giant wet blanket over our base—as evidenced by the decision of so many Democrats to not bother to vote in the midterms.