Rick Perlstein

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

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.

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

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.

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.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

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.

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.

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.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.