Matthew Dowd Quotations

Obviously, a lot of things that the administration had wanted to accomplish in 2005 and going into 2006 were tough.

Obviously, his look has a high degree of intensity.

moderate buy that will get the message through.

Former President Bush's approval on the economy at this same time in 1991 was 28 percent and fell to the mid-teens in 1992.

We can never have enough strategy. We have enough tactics but not enough strategy,

We took one message and designed lots of different avenues to communicate it. They took a lot of different messages and drove them all into one big funnel.

President Bush maintains an approval on the economy in the mid-forties -- exactly what Clinton had at the end of 1995 and above what Reagan had in 1983.

Voters have a tendency to reward leadership. This means a large body of people are open to hearing what the governor has to say about the next four years.

Michigan is one of the opportunities -- and there's not a lot of them when overall the numbers don't look good.

Every incumbent president in the last 25 years has been behind the opposition in the latter part of his first term -- the sky is not falling.

November will be a very, very close race. But the poll is good news for us and not good news for the Democrats.

bad news for the Bush team and declared 'the sky is falling' once again.

This is part of our efforts to highlight what has happened over the last two years. This is sort of the start of that dialogue.

No matter the ups and downs of the poll numbers, this race will be very close. Thus, without an opponent, the current numbers only capture half the story.

The Kerry campaign is working on their 16th negative ad.

It's the first time all the candidates will be judged in comparison to others, so they need to be cognizant of people beginning to see this as a choice.

We think it's important to remember what happened on 9/11 as we devise policies to address what happened, ... is a good ad, laying out the challenges this country's been through. We've had tremendously positive feedback. We're happy with the debate that the ad started, and we want to continue that. That's sort of how we see that.

It shows the public rewards leaders. If you lead and say 'this is what we want to do,' even if you don't succeed in the short run, the public will support you. The public supports infrastructure improvements and they see the governor leading.

As the inevitable discussion proceeds in the months ahead, this memo should provide both perspective and a reality check. President Bush's approval numbers will again fall back to more realistic levels fairly quickly. All were quite successful on Election Day.

This is an issue that has an exceedingly high number of threads in it. It involves race, it involves culture, it involves crime, it involves justice.

The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter.

Democrats have a problem if they go one way and don't emphasize the rule of law and only have compassion. The Republicans have a problem if they only go with the rule of law. There has to be a balance.

Among swing voters, they don't care about the party labels. They want things solved.