Quotes by Rick Perlstein

Lyndon B. Johnson thought hed have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (Thats me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).

Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the American people, the less liberals are going to be able to understand the soul of his appeal.

Whatever you think about his intelligence, whats unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And thats more fun, right? Its more fun to feel good than feel bad. Thats part of our human state.

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

Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditrys 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.

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, Reagans brand of leadership was what I call a liturgy of absolution. He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldnt want that?

In Ronald Reagans 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.

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.

Look at libertys 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.