Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.
Every White House I have covered since Reagan, when I got here, power has been more concentrated in the White House than the one before.
If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.
Donald Trump's being authentic to what he ran on and what got elected.
What's sort of remarkable is that, especially in the Israel and the Russia cases, you have got a U.S. citizen, Donald Trump, siding with a foreign leader against the U.S. president. There is a reason why president-elects have tried to remain mute during their transitional periods, relatively, because you just don't want to be for somebody - some other country against your own government, and especially when you're about to take the helm of that government.
There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.
The ugliness can sometimes be super ugly, but also a warning sign of something down below.
Maybe you're willing to tolerate a lot of bigotry from Donald Trump if you say, just change things, just change things.
If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.
We know the 65-point policy points, to the extent that they exist, but is Hillary Clinton willing to be vulnerable, is she willing to be funny, is she willing to be both authoritative, but also real? And so less what she says than the emotional tone she sets. It takes a lot of confidence to be a vulnerable speaker on this stage. And sometimes she hasn't always projected the confidence it takes to be in some ways weak. But that's what I think people were looking for, that moment of human connection.
Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.
If Donald Trump is just tweeting about a union guy, then he's just being the bully we have seen. But if he uses the power of the presidency to back up some of those tweets and he's really, really coming down with a hammer on people he doesn't like using the power of the presidency, then we're seeing something very new and very different.
Emotion is the foundation of reason.
The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.
It's hard to imagine a party that is not corrupted by hatred.
The policies of the Democratic Party have always been in cultural consonance with the culture of the working class. And, somehow, they missed that.
What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.
Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.
People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.
I have come to think we have to treat Donald Trump's tweets like Snapchat. It's just something that is going to go away. And it flies out of some region of his brain and it goes out into the ether. And usually it's on the realm of media.
We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.
Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.
The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.
America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.
The rich don't exploit the poor, they just out-compete them.
