Mark McKinnon

Rand Paul comes off like an academic stiff who wants to give us a lecture on American civics.

Running for president is hard. But it's good preparation. Because being president is a lot harder.

To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.

Presidential primary debates are an important part of our political process. But the media has wrested complete control from the parties and candidates over everything, including the number, the format, the qualifications, and the moderators. And they've become a circus.

A messy participatory process is representative democracy at its best.

A troubled economy is always the sitting president's fault. It was when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, and when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by running against George W. Bush.

America as we know it will end unless we end Medicare as we know it.

The Hippocratic Oath says do no harm. It's the Hypocritical Oath that says do no harm to one's political future.

Voters crave authenticity.

Mitt Romney is a businessman, a turnaround artist, a CEO. That is who he is. The former governor has experience in the public and private sector.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

Sarah Palin is brilliant. She is a media magnet and a media magnate. She creates headlines and draws crowds wherever she goes, whether it's 98 degrees in the desert of Arizona or below freezing in the snow of Wisconsin.

Normally, when politicians talk about 'cutting the budget,' they really mean reducing the amount of increase. Actual spending goes up while the politicians claim to have 'cut the budget.'

One thing is clear: Ron Paul defies labels.

Elections are about the future. And the GOP will not win a campaign focused on the past.

Mitt Romney is a nice guy. But, we know where nice guys finish in politics.

Public unions are big money.

Public employees contribute real value for the benefit of all citizens. Public-union bosses collect real money from all taxpayers for the benefit of a few.

Life inside the Beltway bubble dulls your thinking.

Defending birthright citizenship is about being on the right side of liberty. The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican Party.

America's commitment to religious freedom and tolerance should not be conditional.

I'm saying it loud: I'm a Republican who supports gay rights.

Republicans constantly claim to be the party that defends the Constitution. We have no legitimate right to that claim until we get right on gay rights.

Sometime in the not too distant future, denying gays the right to marry will be viewed as historically corrupt - as corrupt as denying slaves their freedom.

For most of my life, I've considered myself a political centrist.

Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

To open up new markets and create American jobs, we need to make global bilateral free trade agreements a priority as they were under the Clinton administration.

Wind and solar power are land-intensive, a green sin, but not energy-dense, and affordable only when heavily subsidized. And wind power must be supplemented with hydrocarbons for reliability.

When you look at the money spent by labor unions for Democrats, it comes as no surprise the Democrats crafted a campaign-finance 'disclosure' bill with the thresholds adjusted to exempt unions.

As a husband and as a father of girls, I cannot imagine any woman in my family making the sacrifice of sanity required to run for office. The limited reward for public service cannot blunt the cost.

Every president becomes a caricature. The press, partisans, late-night shows, and other arbiters of our culture these days boil down complicated and multi-faceted personalities into one-dimensional punchlines.

Great presidents, and even those not so great, never complained about the hands they were dealt. Just the opposite. They assumed they were in the big chair to meet big challenges, no matter how difficult.

I'm amazed, as quirky, individual and selfish as most of us are, that anyone stays married for long.

Politics only makes the difficult challenge of marriage even harder, with the demands of the job and the public spotlight it casts on a union.

When people see political ads, they think someone's lying to them.

George W. Bush was president through some of the darkest days of our history and yet his optimism never waned. He is optimistic by nature, but he also understood the importance of always communicating a sense that things will get better.

If you're a Democrat and 'The New York Times' is calling for your head, you know it's time for an exit strategy.

It's never popular among young people to be part of the establishment.

If Democrats start consistently winning Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, the electoral outlook for Republicans in the future is mighty bleak.

The No Child Left Behind Act will be one of President Bush's enduring legacies. And it was engineered and inaugurated with a truly bipartisan coalition in Congress. Accountability, standards, and truly measuring student performance just makes sense. The only real debate about the law was and is whether or not it was adequately funded.

It's much more powerful and compelling to create a positive vision than it is to tear somebody down.

Special interests and opponents have figured out how easy it is to disrupt town halls and get their own message out. The days of the truly free-form town halls may be over.

Party switching has all the emotional edges and baggage of divorce.

Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.

The Republican Party needs to, first of all, quit electing people in primaries that have prehistoric notions about women's issues.

Negativity drove me out of politics in the mid-Nineties.

Donors, like voters, increasingly expect candidates to exercise fiscal discipline.

The GOP cannot expect to win the presidency in the future by simply relying on running up big numbers with white voters.

Immigration is the most explosive issue I've seen in my political career.

My brother is one of my true heroes. Steady and sober where I am impulsive and emotional.