Dick Morris famous quotes

As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.
-- Dick Morris

#Positive #Party #Leader

It is from the center that leaders must lead.
-- Dick Morris

#Leader #Political

Take whatever position you want, but do take a position, because once you do, ample money awaits you on either side.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Want #Sides

Every donation received is a potential negative ad. Vetting money is just as important as raising it.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Important #Negative

Despite romantic fantasies about caring candidates who learn of America in donut shops, most politicians rely on media to teach them what concerns the average person.
-- Dick Morris

#Caring #Media #Average

In fighting scandal, the key is not to overreact.
-- Dick Morris

#Fighting #Keys #Political

The White House will run itself while the president is away. That's why he has to be sure not to be away too much.
-- Dick Morris

#Running #White #House

The typical presidential staff resents the vice-president even more than they do the first lady.
-- Dick Morris

#Presidential #Political #Vices

There is literally no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed well and articulately to today's voters in thirty seconds.
-- Dick Morris

#Ideas #Political #Voters

Like the battleships of old, omnibus programs present too tempting a target, too easily destroyed by a single attack, to make it through a fight.... It is through incremental change after change, step after step, that a statesman of today can vindicate a bold vision.
-- Dick Morris

#Fighting #Political #Vision

The Democratic Party opposes tax cuts but it cannot say so publicly. Thus, it is forced to support the idea of lowering the tax burden but using class warfare rhetoric to dispute the allocation of the relief.
-- Dick Morris

#Party #Cutting #Class

The key to controlling your own political party, so that it does not eat you alive, is to realize that while Democratic and Republican leaders differ sharply, their voters do not.
-- Dick Morris

#Party #Keys #Leader

The opposing party rarely causes so much angst as does one's own.
-- Dick Morris

#Party #Political #Doe

A politician can do what he thinks is right, he just has to be sophisticated in how he goes about it. Those who seek a president who 'will disregard the polls and just lead,' ask for the political equivalent of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade.'
-- Dick Morris

#Thinking #Light #Political

The key to running a campaign on the cheap is to avoid spending money on anything other than projecting a message.
-- Dick Morris

#Running #Keys #Political

Often GOP political strategy seems like the human wave theory of the Chinese military translated to politics. Where Beijing uses masses of soldiers to overwhelm their adversaries, the GOP uses huge campaign budgets as a substitute for strategy, thought or issues.
-- Dick Morris

#Military #Issues #Political

The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Television #Being Lied

Rebut the negative, and the opposing campaign has not merely lost a skirmish, it has suffered almost irreparable damage. An effective rebuttal makes it hard for the campaign whose ad is destroyed to be believed about anything ever again.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Negative #Campaigns

Spin is overrated. It is strategy, not spin, that wins elections.
-- Dick Morris

#Winning #Political #Election

Today, a politician does not just need public support to win elections; he needs it to govern.
-- Dick Morris

#Winning #Support #Political

The greater informational levels of the voters, their decreasing inhibitions in expressing disagreement, and their greater preference for Jeffersonian direct involvement, all make the need for a 'permanent campaign' to sell a president's policies all the more crucial.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #President #Needs

The most basic decision a modern politician must make is whether to be aggressive or conciliatory.
-- Dick Morris

#Decision #Political #Politician

Leadership is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go.
-- Dick Morris

#Country #Thinking #Political

There is no substitute for a clear vision and a decisive direction.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Vision #Substitutes

We in politics are accustomed to seeing reality firsthand and then watching its distant cousin, events as portrayed by the media, unfold on our televisions. We know that what happened in Congress and what is reported to have taken place are two very different things. But that disjuncture, so familiar to politicians, is new to the viewing public. By seeing war and war coverage juxtaposed nightly on their screens, Americans have learned the crucial lesson: not to trust the news anchors.
-- Dick Morris

#Cousin #War #Taken

[T]he harm [Clinton AG] Reno did to American national security in the fight against terror was incalculable.
-- Dick Morris

#Fighting #Politics #Clinton

Each morning we sat reading our copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times and ruminated on their prophecies of doom and quagmire. Then we looked up to see, on television, correspondents actually embedded with our troops, reporting quick advances, one- sided firefights, melting opposition and, finally, welcoming crowds.
-- Dick Morris

#Morning #New York #Reading

...nobody would think of asking the U.N. General Assembly what it thinks because it is dominated by nations with no power and less legitimacy
-- Dick Morris

#Thinking #Asking #Politics

More and more, the Democrats are not merely inconsistent, wrong and/or misguided - they are the worst of all possible things you can be in Washington: irrelevant.
-- Dick Morris

#Politics #Misguided #Worst

If you're going to be a sexual predator, be a Democrat.
-- Dick Morris

#Politics #Predator #Democrat

Yes' is a far more potent word than 'no' in American politics. By adopting the positions which animate the political agenda for the other side, one can disarm them and leave them sputtering with nothing to say.
-- Dick Morris

#Political #Agendas #Sides

I love Karl Rove. He elected Bush.
-- Dick Morris

Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form.
-- Dick Morris

#Art #Mean #Sacrifice

Anybody who thinks that getting a communication from a voter in your district is spam - that guy is pork. Roast pork unless he changes his point of view.
-- Dick Morris

#Communication #Thinking #Views

Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words 'gay marriage' are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.
-- Dick Morris

#Gay #Public Opinion #Unions

The problem: Democrats have to drop their stupid class-warfare rhetoric. With 74 million Americans owning stock in one form or another, anything which helps them can't be derided as a sop to the rich.
-- Dick Morris

#Stupid #Class #Politics

... the top 10 percent of incomes pay 70 percent of the income taxes and cast about 25 percent of the vote.
-- Dick Morris

#Top 10 #Income #Politics

I probably had 150 meetings with Trent Lott. He has said exactly as many racist things to me as Bill Clinton has, which is to say zero.
-- Dick Morris

#Zero #Racist #Politics

Democrats are not about to nominate anyone who backs the tax cut, and Americans are not going to elect anyone who favors a tax increase.
-- Dick Morris

#Cutting #Favors #Increase

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.
-- Dick Morris

#War #Iraq #News

The stronger Hillary is, the weaker she is. The more she seems like a likely presidential winner, the more difficult the senate race becomes in New York. It's perfect.
-- Dick Morris

#New York #Race #Perfect

No true patriot could be for Ron Paul.
-- Dick Morris

#Patriot

I didn't do what they said I did. I may have done enough so that I don't know if I can prove my innocence.
-- Dick Morris

#Done #May #Innocence

Presidents generally do what they are good at in their first four years, then spend their second term responding to the agendas imposed upon them by events.
-- Dick Morris

#Years #President #Four

No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.
-- Dick Morris

#Military #Pride #Gay

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
-- Dick Morris

#Fighting #Challenges #Lines

Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over'? Well, they're beginning to have a case.
-- Dick Morris

#Montana #Agents #Cases

Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination.
-- Dick Morris

#Ideas #Mind #Ambitious

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future.
-- Dick Morris

#Spontaneous #Grassroots #Spontaneous Combustion