But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.

[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.

My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.

I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.

As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.