This Town Quotes

“The nation’s leaders keep throwing out the word “Washington” as a vulgar abstraction. Nothing new here: the anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“The president’s stump speeches could carry the forced air of a Van Halen reunion tour with Sammy Hagar in for David Lee Roth.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“The life cycle of public disgrace has been condensed to where the actual offense gets washed away, leaving just a neutral sheen of notoriety.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“a sinner is pleading to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates: “Wait, those weren’t lies,” the sinner says. “That was spin!”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being “called upon” to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“You know you've made it in D.C. when someone says that--"It isn't clear what he does"--about you.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“Washington read”: the act of telling someone, “I didn’t read your book but did praise it on TV.”)”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing,”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“If you think about it, a president blowing off the Correspondents’ Association dinner might be a political boon in this anti-Washington day and age, a nod to the “average Americans.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Rail attendants dismiss excited train hobbyists as “foamers” (foaming at the mouth as they board their choo-choos).”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Tim Russert is dead. But the room was alive. You can’t work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously. It’s the kind of thing people notice.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“Everyone marveled--between courses at The Palm--at how out of touch Mittens was.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital

“The low point occurred in July, during Romney’s junior week abroad, in which the press became increasingly frustrated over Romney’s refusal to talk to them. It came to a head in Warsaw during a visit by Romney to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there. As the former governor walked to his car, reporters shouted questions at him about his earlier mishaps. “Kiss my ass,” admonished Romney’s traveling press aide, Rick Gorka. “Show some respect. This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Channeling Fonzie, Gorka also instructed Jonathan Martin of Politico to “shove it.” Some in the political echo-system treated this as a major international incident, a skirmish between weary but still potent superpowers—the press, the Romney campaign—that conjured Cold War–like tensions. After Gorka’s unsacred words raced around the world, the jackals rechristened the Polish holy site “Gorka Park.” Ryan, on the other”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“At the brunch, I told her I had been in Alaska a few months earlier. And she opened her mouth wide in a look of genuine surprise, as if no one had ever gone to Alaska before. “Why didn’t you look me up?” she said, again sounding sincere. I made a joke about not wanting to get shot. She made me promise to look her up in Wasilla next time. (How does one “look up” Sarah Palin in Alaska, anyway? Is she listed? Can we become texting buddies?)”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“In the next picture, Reagan is saying, “Haley, have I ever told you the one about the two Episcopal preachers?” “No, sir, Mr. President.” “One of the preachers said to the other, ‘Times have really changed, haven’t they? I never had sex with my wife before we were married, did you?’ “And the other Episcopal priest said, ‘I don’t know, what is your wife’s maiden name?”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, “need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“There is an expression here on Capitol Hill,” Issa told me. “‘Don’t ever get between a member and a camera.’” That can be particularly harrowing in the case of Issa, who had purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: “It’s all about me.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town

“No benign deity plucks television news show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky.”
― Mark Leibovich, This Town