February 9, 2012
Archive: Verbatim
When Republicans act like Democrats, they lose. And in Newt Gingrich’s case he had to resign. In Rick Santorum’s case, he lost by the biggest margin of any Senate incumbent since 1980.
— Mitt Romney, quoted by NBC News.
If Barack Obama loses this fall, he will forever seem a disappointment: a symbolically important but accidental figure who raised hopes he could not fulfill and met difficulties he did not know how to surmount. He meant to show the unity of America but only underscored its division. As a candidate, he symbolized transformation; in office, he applied incrementalism and demonstrated the limits of change. His most important achievement, helping forestall a second Great Depression, will be taken for granted or discounted in the dismay about the economic problems he did not solve. His main legislative accomplishment, the health-care bill, may well be overturned; his effect on America’s international standing will pass; his talk about bridging the partisan divide will seem one more sign of his fatal naïveté.
If he is reelected, he will have a chance to solidify what he has accomplished and, more important, build on what he has learned. All of this is additional motivation, as if he needed any, for him to drive for reelection; none of it makes him any more palatable to those who oppose him and his goals.
— James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic.
Republicans, however, can and should take partial credit for this. Obama is so moderate in part because the Republicans are so extreme. Politicians are ideological, of course, but they are also opportunistic. And the GOP, in closing ranks against almost every major initiative Obama has attempted, has taken away most of his opportunities to be truly liberal.
Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post in response to a new study that finds President Obama “is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II, while President George W. Bush was the most conservative president in the post-war era.”
At the last possible moment to save his re-election, the economy is beginning to hum, as evidenced by Friday’s jobs report. And Obama’s Republican opponents are shaping up to be as formidable as, well, marshmallows. While Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are making each other unelectable, the president is singing Al Green, congratulating Super Bowl winners, playing with science projects, raising obscene amounts of campaign cash and watching his poll numbers soar.
— Dana Millbank, writing in the Washington Post, asserting that President Obama just might be the luckiest man alive.
Because right now, angry and almost broke, Newt is no longer the leading candidate to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. That man is Rick Santorum. And what makes Gingrich especially grumpy is that the man he is losing to was once just a pimply backbencher in the 1994 Republican Revolution… So for now Newt is left broke and unloved, facing the long road ahead with a raised fist. There probably will be better days ahead — Super Tuesday offers southern states, and Newt has already proven his ability to rise from the political dead. But Rick Santorum just had his best night of the campaign. For all his faults, he has none of the personal baggage of Newt that might offend the faithful.
— John Avlon, writing in the Daily Beast, noting that Newt Gingrich’s narrative of a two-man race collapsed under Rick Santorum’s trifecta win last night.
It’ll be a cold day in Gila Bend, Arizona, when I watch that movie.
— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in a CNBC interview, on “Game Change,” which premieres on HBO March 10 and is based on the best-selling book of the same name about McCain’s failed presidential campaign and Sarah Palin’s role in it.
The only thing I have not been accused of in all these over-hyped descriptions of my relations with women, with the opposite sex, the only thing they have never accused me of is being gay. I have nothing against homosexuals, let it be clear. Quite the contrary. I always thought the more gay people around, the less competition.
— Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in an interview with The Atlantic.
It’s a badge of honor that Romney has decided to try to destroy us.
— Rick Santorum adviser John Brabender, quoted by Byron York, on Romney turning his guns on the former Pennsylvania senator.
Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.
— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by Maureen Dowd, repeating a line he’d heard to sum up what his party should campaign on.
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