Mark Rozell Quotations

He doesn't want to fight battles unnecessarily and create a distance between himself and his party.

I think Tom Davis is about as safe as an incumbent can be these days. Davis strikes a pretty good middle ground for his constituents.

That could hurt Gilmore, ... given the fact there is a majority of women voters in this state, a little bit higher than the norm throughout the country.

It doesn't take much to read between the lines that fear of fallout from a horrific attack is a part of his calculation, ... Understandably, many of us near D.C. find such talk chilling, but he probably has access to intelligence that suggests this should be a real concern.

There was a flurry of legislative activity in the Roosevelt years and there were many factions in the Democratic Party which seldom spoke with one voice. So there was a lot of disagreement.

It was almost like he was putting his name on the ballot next to Kilgore and giving people a chance to have a referendum on his presidency. It was really bad timing for Jerry Kilgore that this election coincided exactly with the low point of the Bush presidency.

The Bush-hating phenomenon was not so important until the president's popularity more generally started to decline - at which point the voices of Bush's strongest opponents take on much more importance, because much of public opinion is beginning to dovetail with the views of those who haven't liked Bush from the beginning.

This is a particularly competitive race combined with the perception that the stakes are enormously high, and that has instigated all the donating, despite the fact that neither candidate inspires much passion.

This campaign started with Gore ignoring Bradley and Bradley vowing to run a different kind of campaign. Now it's become personal. These two guys really seem to rub each other the wrong way and it's getting out of hand.

It's just that Robertson--given some of what he has said in the past--doesn't help to promote that discussion,

It's not the amount. It's the fact that person has crossed over the line and publicly become associated with the interests of one political party over the other. That's the rub.

It will be talked about in the campaign -- an opponent would be foolish not to bring it up -- but I don't think it's enough to put a strong incumbent in the 'vulnerable' category.

They can go back to their constituency and claim they are working extra hard to get the people's work done. They can say, 'It's everybody else's fault, and look at how terrible the institution is.'?

I remember the conference director said words to the effect that Robertson is one more nutty comment away from becoming irrelevant. Since then, Robertson has made a number of such comments--on China's one-child policy, about wishing for a nuke to take out the State Department building in D.C., among others. It's as though he can't help himself. Oftentimes his comments anger his own supporters the most.