Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

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.

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.

He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. _ Elizabeth Drew

Now even reformers needed political machines.

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

Politics is motion." John Sears

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?

Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.