Rick Perlstein Quotes

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.
Rick Perlstein
The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.
Rick Perlstein
One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew
Rick Perlstein
The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.
Rick Perlstein
He fetishized limits.
Rick Perlstein
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
Rick Perlstein
Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.
Rick Perlstein
Chits knew no ideology.
Rick Perlstein
Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.
Rick Perlstein
Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.
Rick Perlstein
Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.
Rick Perlstein
Do what you are doing. Monastic motto
Rick Perlstein
In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.
Rick Perlstein
Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.
Rick Perlstein
To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.
Rick Perlstein
One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.
Rick Perlstein
Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.
Rick Perlstein
Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.
Rick Perlstein
A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.
Rick Perlstein
(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.
Rick Perlstein
I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.
Rick Perlstein
Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.
Rick Perlstein
Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.
Rick Perlstein
For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.
Rick Perlstein
Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.
Rick Perlstein
A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
Rick Perlstein
Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.
Rick Perlstein
Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.
Rick Perlstein
Now even reformers needed political machines.
Rick Perlstein
Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.
Rick Perlstein
An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.
Rick Perlstein
He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew
Rick Perlstein
Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.
Rick Perlstein
What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?
Rick Perlstein
Politics is motion." John Sears
Rick Perlstein
Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.
Rick Perlstein
Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon
Rick Perlstein
College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.
Rick Perlstein