Mark Halperin > Quotes

“What happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward.”
― Mark Halperin

“It was Bill Clinton who once pithily captured the contrast between the two parties when it came to selecting a presidential standard-bearer: "Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“One way of seeing all this was as a symptom of postmillennial decay, the degradation of public discourse, and the encroachment of celebrity worship into the arena of national affairs. Another way of looking at it was as an indication of the GOP's state of disarray. Then there was the way Trump perceived the thing: as a manifestation of his magnificence...”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“One voice can change a room. And if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“But Bachmann’s efforts to strut her IQ were undermined by gaffes galore. In New Hampshire, she hailed the state for being “where the shot was heard round the world in Lexington and Concord.” (That blast emanated from Massachusetts.) On June 27, the day of her official announcement in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, Bachmann proclaimed in a Fox News interview that “John Wayne was from Waterloo.” (Wayne was in fact from Winterset, Iowa; serial killer John Wayne Gacy was from Waterloo.) From now on, her son Lucas razzed his mother, “you can’t say George Washington was the first president unless we Google that shit first.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, ‘You’re not going to raise that fucking price!’” And the Chinese: “Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent!”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“Heading into the race, the perception among political professionals and the press had been that the rival campaign squadrons were more or less evenly matched. But as the smoke cleared, a consensus quickly emerged that the Democrats had methodically been building an atomic clock while the Republicans were trifling with Tinkertoys. Chicago’s mockery of Boston was hushed but withering.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“With an icy stare, Obama set a trap: “Please proceed, Governor.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“Yet Romney’s swagger went only so far. When the paperback version of his book hit shelves that February, observers noted that one line from the hardback, about the success of Romneycare, had been expunged: the author’s hopeful boast that “we can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“You have to be willing to lose to win, and you’re going to lose a lot”—a lot of votes, a lot of states. “No one gets elected president without being humiliated. How you deal with the humiliation is the key.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“Standing in the shadow of the most prodigious political and fund-raising apparatus the Democratic Party had ever seen, [Biden] felt like a stranger to it, as if he'd walked into an opulent wedding where he knew no one.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“The unwillingness of the rich guy to take advantage of being a rich guy for fear of looking like a rich guy was a chain of logic too Ouroborosian to ponder for too long.”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“...The campaign was moving cash around the country as if it were monopoly money.”
― Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“The unfolding scene was a semiotician's fantasia.”
― Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible combinations.”
― Mark Halperin

“Romney spent the next twenty-four hours with McCain, traipsing with him from Manchester to Peterborough to Salem, agog at his inability to complete three sentences without dropping an f-bomb. (Romney employed prim substitutes for profanities: “blooming” for “fucking,” “grunt” for “shit.”)”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“PULCHRITUDE”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“The press would've guillotined her on the spot and played soccer with her severed head.”
― Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“ripe to hit the fairway. The famously competitive”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012

“For the next ten days, Romney campaigned like a conservative in carnation of Bill Clinton circa 1992.”
― Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“...New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, qualified for the label -- but he was a divorced, pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-gun, Jewish plutocrat who had switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican to Independent as nonchalantly as if he'd been changing his loafers.”
― Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“percent of Hispanics, he now stood at”
― Mark Halperin, Double Down: Game Change 2012