Mark Shields Quotes

George Washington was the president who could never tell a lie, and Richard Nixon was the president who could never tell the truth. Donald Trump is truly the president who can't tell the difference.

If Mitt Romney had got the percentage Ronald Reagan did of Hispanics, he would have defeated Barack Obama.

Tim Kaine reminds me of - Peter Hart.Tim Kaine is a good neighbor. He's kind of the dependable, you know, friendly, helpful. And, you know, he would be over there. He would give you a hand if there were a problem at the house.

Now the Republicans have a very low-scale, by economic standards, base. Donald Trump has.

Peter Hart, the pollster, has a question when he asks about presidential or vice presidential candidates, what kind of a neighbor would they be? And several Democrats - George W. Bush was always seen to be a good friendly neighbor who would pick up the newspapers if you were out of town or check your mail.

Sometimes, you just let the country have its way, and you don't try to determine the shape of the country. You sort of modestly step back and let the country figure out what it believes.

My church [Catholisism] is hurting from arrogance and from its indifference to the suffering of children that were abused and the inclination of the leadership to protect the institution, rather than the children.

I think an increasing number of Republicans are perplexed and actually nervous about Donald Trump and Russia, nervous in the sense that he is gratuitously giving Democrats the national security advantage, that they're standing up for the country.

I'm not sure Betsy DeVos has ever spent a day in a public school. And I don't - I'm pretty sure Donald Trump hasn't.

Democrats, if they're smart and they're not brain-dead, are doing two things right now.They're having self-deprecating humor written for them. There was no humor in Cleveland. And they are not making this a Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is appealing to the basest, the most selfish and the most literally un-American of instincts.

The Sheldon Adelsons, the Koch brothers, the George Soroses, what we want to try to do is force them into the parties, not so that Kasich or whoever is going to straight to them and trying to kiss up to special interests, but so the parties have the power and they can direct the money.

George W. Bush in 2000 went to private financing for the nomination, but he accepted public funding in the general. And, quite frankly, so did - it was broken in 2008, when Barack Obama decided he wasn't going to do that.

People in the White House work hard, whatever administration. They get rewarded in psychic income, a sense that they are involved in something bigger than themselves, that it's important.

I thought Mike Pence, upon reflection to me, came across a little bit like your favorite aunt who refuses, in spite of first-person evidence that grandpa has been drunk and disorderly in public, that, says, no, no, grandpa would never do that, even though grandpa is being taken off in handcuffs.

The Democrats are now an upscale party.

I think any advocate who is effective has fully acquainted himself or herself with the legislator they are going to meet. Know what committees they are on, what issues they are interested in, all in an effort to build a bridge for communicating with them.

I don't hear any clear, coherent message [from Democrats]. I mean, when you're a party out of power, it's the time to be a national party chair.

The argument of those who are being criticized at any time, the civil rights movement forward, the anti-war movement forward, is, it's always outside agitators doing it.

I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump was born without the embarrassment gene or the moral reservation gene.

I mean, this is a group [Republicans], don't forget, that gave its presidential straw ballot to Ron Paul, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul and Rand Paul. So, they have abandoned what - their libertarian values and instincts to embrace [Donald] Trump.

There is no question that, in 1980, Ronald Reagan had been portrayed as a war-monger, somebody who couldn't do anything off a script. And the one debate with President Jimmy Carter, he stood toe-to-toe and reassured people that he wasn't bound and determined to start World War III on the spot and could make a coherent statement.

The Democratic Party is a coalition. Its strength and its weakness is, it's a coalition of interest groups, caucuses. It's a lot less homogeneous than the Republican Party, where people tend to believe the same things and oftentimes look alike.

The corporations who invest in lobbyists, it pays in terms of tax loopholes, tax subsidies, all the rest. It pays. Clearly, the money has a big effect.

I think the Democrats did a terrible disservice, the Hillary Clinton campaign did, to Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine had the earned reputation of being one of the most respected and well-liked, and not cheap partisan members of the United States Senate. And they turned him into an attack dog.

Franklin Roosevelt ran on a balanced budget in 1932, and the greatest president, certainly, of the 20th century. So the idea that you lay out a predicate right now, Donald Trump has recreated the Republican Party in his image.

The fact is that it's the most dangerous place to be on the political scale is to brand those on the other side as racist. That's the atomic bomb. That's the nuclear weapon of an American.

There is always strength in numbers

There's never been a sense of public service about Donald Trump.

Dan Coats, retiring senator from Indiana, a mild-mannered man, a former United States ambassador to Germany, former congressman, said of Ted Cruz he's the most self-centered, narcissistic, pathological liar I have ever seen.And he said, you can quote me on that.

When the party holds the White House, all the political decisions are made in the White House. And being a party chair, you're just an artifact.

John McCain has become the de facto running mate of George W. Bush.

Campaigns are fun. Campaigns are police escorts, they're airplanes, they're crowds, they're balloons, they're bands, a lot of fun. You speak in vague generalities. You get applause for slogans. And then governing comes. And governing is tedious and it's difficult an it's time-consuming and it demands your attention. And policy isn't vague generalities. It's specifics and it's based on knowledge.

Hillary Clinton should get a bounce out of her convention, I mean a bounce in the polls. I think it's probably conceded that Donald Trump got about a three-point bounce out of his conventions. He's closed the gap that much.

I'm a little nervous about public funding. It's better than what we got now.

The lobbying over China most favored nation trading status was disgusting. There's no way in hell that MFN would have passed in '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000 if all these companies hadn't come in flooding and making campaign contributions and ask for people's support. That drove the debate. Every year was the allure of corporate dollars flooding into members' bank accounts.

Drones are sort of the perfect weapon for a country that doesn't want to go to war. It only - there's no fingerprint. There's no direct involvement. There's human beings killed on the other end. You never see them. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to meet their widows. It's sort of an antiseptic warfare.

The Democrats have to do what he did when [Rahm Emanuel] was chairman of the Democratic House Campaign Committee, recruit veterans, recruit football players, recruit business people. And I think that's what the job of the new party chair has to be.

I do look upon the secretary of education's primary responsibility as the quality of education that - and improving the education that every child in American public schools receives.

I believe devoutly that the national election is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament of democracy. And I really do think that heed must be paid, and when people make a decision, those who are on the other side, including me, accept it, for that reason.

Stronger together is, I think, a preposition and a comparative adjective, but it's not really an action verb or what it is.

The strength of Donald Trump as a candidate - and I'm not in any way defending moral convictions or anything of the sort - was that he says what he means, you know where he stands.

I think Donald Trump is obviously the more colorful, the more flamboyant, the more dominant personality.

George Bush says what John Kerry did was noble. Yet he sees him being savaged by his own supporters.

It's both strategic, to get people's minds off other things, and to pick an internal enemy. It's part of [Donald Trump's] psychodynamics to always care about his press coverage intensely. He's more interested in that than anything else.

I do think, over the last years, a lot of Republicans have decided it's not working, what the party believed in, free trade, global capitalism, open borders.

In a strange way, Hillary Clinton was helped and victimized by Barack and Michelle Obama.Michelle Obama was probably better than Barack Obama, if you think about it.Her speech is a masterful, masterful speech. And she delivered it in a persuasively conversational tone.

We had the clip of [Donald] Trump saying: I'm not president of the globe. I'm president of the United States.[Ronald] Reagan would have never said that. [Dwight] Eisenhower would have never said that, because he would have said, yes, I'm president of the United States, but it's in our interests to be securing a world order.