Notable Quotables - 08/17/1992
The Rush to Gush
"Delighted
Democrats like to say of Clinton and Gore that theirs is a partnership where 1
plus 1 equals 5, and when Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore are added to the
equation, 2 plus 2 equals 10. And the power of their numbers does seem to
multiply exponentially at times such as this afternoon, when the eight-bus
caravan made a semi-impromptu stop at a rest area in Bowling Green, Mo."
- Washington Post reporter David Maraniss in an August 6
"Campaign Journal."
Gumbel Gets Tough on the Clinton Buscapade
"How's the trip
going?....What's fun about jumping on a bus and wandering around through over
1,000 miles?"
- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel's first questions to Hillary Clinton
and Tipper Gore, July 20.
"What are people
responding to when they cheer you on this trip?"
- Gumbel's first question to Bill Clinton, July 22 Today.
Nasty Bush
"Are Democrats
willing, even anxious, to be as nasty as the President is going to be?"
- Bryant Gumbel to Clinton consultant Bob Squier, August 10 Today.
"For longtime
observers of the President, the portents, if still tenuous, were unmistakable.
In an effort to persuade himself - as well as the nation - that he can
honorably strike out at his Democratic foes, Bush peppered his remarks with
the same self- defensive rationales that preceded the savage evisceration of
Michael S. Dukakis."
- Boston Globe reporter John Aloysius Farrell, August 10 front page
story.
"In 1988 Bush
promised `no new taxes,' but the television picture of Willie Horton also
helped secure his victory. Now gay groups are convinced that they have
replaced black convicts in the Republican demonology....The ad was effective,
but its sour aftertaste and the wounds opened by the Los Angeles riots have
made it trickier for Republicans to appeal to racial fears."
- Time Associate Editor Priscilla Painton, August 3.
Reagan in Houston: Big Mistake?
"[Bush] is about to
make matters worse by hauling out Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention.
Reagan has become a symbol of what went wrong in the '80s. It's like bringing
the Music Man back to River City, a big mistake."
- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group,
July 31.
No Hard Left In New York, But in Houston...
"People like to
razz the Democrats because their delegates are often so much more liberal than
the public at large. Well, the converse is true of the Republicans, that their
delegates are often much more conservative than the public at large,
particularly the majority of the country that they have to have to win. So the
problem, I think, could be that they come out with such a sharp-edged,
hard-right message that it will be alienating to voters at large, and they're
going to have to figure out how to moderate that."
- Wall Street Journal reporter Michel McQueen, August 10 Fox
Morning News.
"Archconservative
Patrick Buchanan, who launched a primary battle against a President he called
`King George,' will get some official face time at this month's GOP
convention."
- CNN anchor Patrick Greenlaw, August 3 Inside Politics '92.
Cornering Quayle
"I think he [Dan
Quayle] has failed consistently to break out of this terrible reputation he
has, and I think at the convention that's going to be reinforced basically by
us in the media."
- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer
Kenneth T. Walsh, August 10 Fox Morning News.
"Anders' film is a
compassionate meditation on the desperate lengths to which poverty-ridden
decency must go to preserve itself. As such, it makes ruminations on this
subject [single mothers] by the likes of Dan Quayle look supremely irrelevant.
She's talking reality; they're talking country club theory."
- Time movie critic Richard Schickel reviewing the movie Gas
Food Lodging, August 17.
Tax Those Gun-Toting Yahoos
"Now, this is a
free country and I'm not suggesting we deprive our citizens of their right to
bear arms, one of our most cherished - and warped - personal liberties. But
everybody knows freedom carries a price. So shouldn't the freedom to be a
yahoo carry a slightly higher price? That higher price, levied in the form of,
say, a $100 annual registration fee on the nation's 66-odd million legally
registered handguns, could help fund a national health insurance system....The
CBO figures that a 12- cent tax on motor fuels would raise $11 billion more a
year... Why not collect the most money from those likely to cause the most
damage? The operator of any muscle car, especially one with sequential neon
space lights that illuminate the road beneath, should pay the full 12 cents.
Double that for any truck or van equipped with a gun rack."
- U.S. News & World Report Senior Editor John Liscio, July 27.
Purple and Gay?
"A recurrent
fantasy among gays has been that one day, unexpectedly, every homosexual and
bisexual in America will wake up purple, and when friends, relatives,
neighbors, co-workers and other acquaintances see how many gays there are, and
how many of these people already hold their trust, bigotry will vanish."
- Time Senior Writer William A. Henry III, August 3.
Ivy League Republican Time?
"These are the
judgments not of Democratic partisans but of correspondents for Time,
a magazine that over the years has often been identified with precisely the
same establishmentarian, Ivy League Republicanism with which Bush himself is
most comfortable."
- Washington Post literary critic Jonathan Yardley reviewing Marching
In Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush by Time White
House reporters Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, August 9 "Book
World" section.
Shopping Malls or Death
"Shopping malls and
rampant consumerism are killing the planet, according to a new study by
Worldwatch Institute. The study cites wealthy nations, like the U.S., as doing
the most damage. The study found the U.S. has more shopping malls than it does
high schools. And it singled out a huge mall being built in Bloomington,
Minnesota that is expected to draw more visitors than the Vatican or Mecca.
The study says such consumption caused more environmental damage than anything
except the population boom."
- CNN World News anchor David French, July 25.
Imagining Life at CBS
"One envisages the
news editor just minutes before Dan Rather is to go on the air reviewing the
lead story for the CBS Evening News: `Perfect! Not one word is
accurate. Not one statistic is true or informative. We'll go with it! This is
news! The illusions of our time remain intact!'"
- American Spectator Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell in his book The
Conservative Crack-Up.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Brant Clifton, Nicholas Damask, Steve Kaminski, Marian Kelley, Tim Lamer;
Media Analysts
- Jennifer Hardebeck; Circulation Manager
