Sublime

The key to George W. Bush’s electoral success was the segmentation strategies carried out by GOP guru Karl Rove, a direct marketer by trade.

Only lies and exaggerations can promise voters and other citizens a much higher rate of real income growth, and so our politics has become increasingly full of . . . lies and exaggerations. The options are the “tax cut exaggeration” and the “redistribution exaggeration.”

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.

I think we are trained, particularly on the left, to be critical of performance. And I feel we should be more honest in acknowledging that performance is crucial to politics. It doesn't mean it's the only factor––that policy or other factors don't matter. But it is a defining feature.

I am a committed advocate of political rhetoric that is direct and clear. It should be interactive, not one-sided. It should speak to the common sense of common people—with a moral component, but without being inflammatory, preachy, or divisive. In a perfect world, political language would favor those with enough respect for people to tell them the

He is the living embodiment of the old maxim that if you say something often enough, people will believe it. That’s

Another lever was accountability. As the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton was confronted early on with an impossible equation whereby his constituents wanted more public spending, but they hated any politician that raised taxes to finance that spending. Clinton experienced the bitter results: after becoming governor in 1978, he lost his reelectio

People are not necessarily swayed by reason. “The head has never beaten the gut in a political argument yet, and I doubt if it ever will,” Carville writes in All’s Fair.