Quotations (11)

Audacity

How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail
1 to 11 of 11 items
... the imprint of Obama’s climate legacy is everywhere – rows of houses covered in panels, wind turbines stretching across the plains, glistening new solar power plants arising in the desert. === Obama will remain the president who…
Samples of quotes, most from the latter parts of the book which are more interesting to me: Robert Draper identified “the central critique” of the Obama presidency as being “far better versed in hopey-changey atmospherics and cutting-edge…
Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. === Previous generations of…
McConnell knew that most Americans have little time to follow the intricacies of the policy debate, and instead take their cues from indirect signals. Bipartisan agreement provides one such important signal. If the two parties seem to…
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, conducted a detailed study of Tea Party activists and discovered that they saw themselves beset by parasitic Democrats. “Along with illegal immigrants,” she wrote, “low-income Americans and young…
Rather than attack government for being unworkable or too large and proposing to shrink it, as good Reagan Republicans customarily do, he attacked it for being allegedly run by morons and promised to solve all problems by having it be run…
Trump was the very incarnation of every value abhorrent to the Obama coalition, the anti-Obama incarnate—loud, impulsive, ignorant, intolerant, backward-looking. Trump’s racism, misogyny, and contempt for expertise offended…
Clinton failed to carry the Electoral College for a combination of reasons attributable largely to her personal image, rather than her association with the popular incumbent. Her poor decision to use a private email server received more…
For good or for ill, Obama had proposed change on a massive, historic scale. Neither friend nor foe denied the new president’s audacity. === In 1994, Republican Pete Wilson won the governorship in California by railing against illegal…
Conservative Republicans won power, but they lost the future, and they also lost the argument. The triumph of a blustering, cartoonishly dishonest and manifestly anti-intellectual candidate was a forceful display of the party’s retreat…
I criticized him when I felt he deserved it, but mostly I found myself defending and admiring what I concluded early on was an exceptional and historic presidency. === What had Obama promised? To unleash structural transformation in…