The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power. – John Podhoretz
I’ve worked as someone’s deputy, and now it’s time for me to run something. It’s time for me to run my own shop. – John Podhoretz
One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it’s a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can’t when it’s close. – John Podhoretz
As the Republican nominee, it was Romney’s job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them. – John Podhoretz
You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power. – John Podhoretz
It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don’t know than they are about how they’re going to put food on their own tables, or whether their sons will ever find a job. – John Podhoretz
Romney is a good, intelligent, extraordinarily generous man who put on a great fight. But he didn’t understand the country or the people he sought to lead, and that is why he lost. – John Podhoretz
Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we’re desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen. – John Podhoretz
Bouncing a sitting president requires conscious action, a national decision to redirect the country’s course. This cuts against the grain, and that’s why incumbents have a natural advantage. – John Podhoretz
Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called ‘progressives’ should be thanking him for it – even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications. – John Podhoretz
Many people crave security and stability rather than risk-taking, and that doesn’t make them any less American. They are the workers rather than the job creators, and all societies need both. – John Podhoretz
Conservatives have long been suspicious that Romney isn’t truly one of them. The release of his tax returns should settle the matter once and for all: He’s not only to be accepted, but admired and emulated – and by liberals as well as conservatives. – John Podhoretz
Obama’s presidency hasn’t been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs. – John Podhoretz
Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn’t care. This is war – not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that’s a victory he savors and desires – unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail. – John Podhoretz
Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn’t understand that the internet was the direction computing was going. – John Podhoretz
For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion. – John Podhoretz
The most passionately anti-Obama Republican politicians and activists consider themselves the truest and purest of conservatives, and often unleash their scorn and fury on others who also call themselves conservative but differ on strategy and tactics. – John Podhoretz
America is great not because it’s a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual. – John Podhoretz
The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress’s power in the future. – John Podhoretz
Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills – the pension bills they cannot afford – come due. They’ll have to go after existing contracts with current workers. – John Podhoretz
All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth. – John Podhoretz
Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left. – John Podhoretz
There’s no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There’s only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline. – John Podhoretz
Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party’s voters. – John Podhoretz
