Quotes About GOP

The early favorite for the GOP nomination and 'natural' heir to Reagan was Vice President George H.W. Bush. But Bush was an imperfect fit for the party's base.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don't support Republicans is because they don't trust the GOP establishment.

Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.

'Character Doesn't Count' has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. 'Virtue Doesn't Matter' might be another. But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump's shortcomings prove it daily.

As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away.

Conservatism, in the world of American politics, no longer means "to struggle for the continuation of institutions and policies which best reflect values of moderation and fiscal prudence".  Conservatism now means a type of extremism which is anathema to earlier incarnations of the GOP.

Five GOP representative candidates this session have shocked me to my soul at how blatant they have trivialized rape. My prayers were answered in their defeat!

Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater's principled stand was misunderstood by many African Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP's call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced "an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed."3

Notice that the GOP program—articulated by Douglass and affirmed by black leaders—is none other than the color-blind ideal outlined in Martin Luther King's famous "dream." King envisioned a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. This is substantially what Douglass and other black Republicans called for, more than a century earlier.

But many southern whites were not under the racist hold of the Democrats. As they became more prosperous, these whites came to see the GOP reflect their beliefs in economic opportunity and upward mobility. They also found Republicans more in tune with their patriotism as well as their socially conservative views. Quite naturally, they moved over to a party that better reflected their interests and aspirations.

In a remarkable book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston make the case that white southerners switched to the Republican Party not because of racism but because they identified the GOP with economic opportunity and upward mobility.

Competition breeds excellence, including in the GOP race.

Republicans are being counseled to move the party to the left, but in my experience, those who advocate more liberal policies for the GOP are wrongheaded or Democrats, or both.

On GOP Tax Cuts: They'll take food out of the mouths of children to give tax cuts to the wealthiest.

Numbers were catching up with the GOP. In time, with enough people of color, have-nots, single women, liberal urban men, and members of the LBGT bloc voting, the center-right paradigm would become center-left.

GOP voters were the opposite of Trump's kryptonite; they were his superpower.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark on October 8, "Go write this down: after November 3, the price of GOP politics is going to be an insistence that, actually, Donald Trump did win the election and/or would have won if it hadn't been stolen/rigged.

Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP.

John Connally's conversion to the GOP raised the intellectual level of both parties.

Elections are about the future. And the GOP will not win a campaign focused on the past.

Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

In 1964, the GOP ceased to be the party of Lincoln and became the party of southern whites. All of the Republican presidential nominees in the future would harvest racist votes, whether consciously or not, because from then on the GOP would be the party of white privilege, and the Democrats, of minority rights.