Steve Roberts -- Team Clinton: The Starting Line-Up of the Pro-Clinton Press Corps -- August 1, 1996

Steve Roberts
Reporter, New York Daily News;
panelist on PBS's Washington Week
in Review; former Senior Writer,
U.S. News & World Report

"One of the interesting things about Newt Gingrich is to become Speaker without running in a national election. This is almost like a parliamentary system where he ran in one small borough, and then because his party won the majority, he becomes a national figure. So it's an oddity that we're not used to in this system."
-- Washington Week in Review, Jan. 6, 1995.

"An awful lot of people, Cal, decided during the Reagan years that this could be done painlessly. Remember Ronald Reagan, your old buddy, he used to say, you know, `All you've got to do is cut waste, fraud, and abuse, cut welfare, cut foreign aid,' and that's how you would solve the problem. Reaganism never involved pain for God-fearing, taxpaying, hard-working middle Americans. Now, finally, the Reagan fantasy is coming face to face with reality."
-- On CNBC's Cal Thomas show, May 16, 1995.

"The Republicans, for 25 years, have seldom avoided the temptation to play the race card politically in this country. It goes back to the '60s, when Richard Nixon ran as a law-and-order President. In the '70s, Ronald Reagan, and the late '70s, he ran for President in 1980 talking about welfare queens, associating the Great Society programs with minorities, and with waste, and with crime in the streets. There has been a consistent impulse, Willie Horton was just a continuation of that, to use this issue to divide people."
-- Washington Week in Review, May 8, 1992.

"In the Republican convention of '92, the message was not inclusive, it was exclusive. It wasn't a unifying idea, it was a wedge idea, it was dividing people, it was much more self-righteous. When Marilyn Quayle got up and said, basically condemned women who out to work, you know, I had the picture sitting there in the hall and thinking, all of these women sitting there about to go to work in their beauty parlors and their offices saying, `Thanks a whole lot, Marilyn, if I were married to, you know, an heir of a newspaper fortune, I'd like to stay home too, but I can't afford to, I've got to go out and work.'"
-- During September 7, 1994 panel discussion carried by C-SPAN.

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