Quotessence
Home / Authors / Gene Healy

Gene Healy Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllPoliticsUs PoliticsUs PresidentsUs PresidencyDisastersBarack ObamaEmergenciesExecutive PowersFemaGeorge W BushHurrican KatrinaNational SecurityPresidencyPresidential DebatesTelevision ShowsThe ChildrenThe West WingWarWhite House

Famous Gene Healy Quotes

“As noted in Chapter 4, there’s abundant evidence that presidents use their disaster-declaration authority under the Stafford Act to aid their own reelection prospects. Presidents direct more disaster relief to politically important states and declare more disasters in election years—and the average number of yearly disaster declarations has been increasing over time.35 Bill Clinton still holds the election-year record, with 75 disaster declarations in 1996; George W. Bush came in a close second in 2004, and has declared disasters at a faster rate overall than Clinton.”

PoliticsEmergenciesUs PoliticsDisastersUs PresidentsFema
Book:The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Create image

“As Elvin T. Lim noted in his 2002 study of presidential rhetoric, by the late 20th century, it was ‘‘all about the children,’’ with ‘‘Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton [making] 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area.’’ Granted, George Washington had mentioned children in his seventh annual message, protesting ‘‘the frequent destruction of innocent women and children’’ by Indian marauders.107 But in the modern State of the Union address, references to children have a different tenor,”

PoliticsUs PoliticsThe Children
Book:The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Create image

“In business or in politics, responsibility without authority is any chief executive’s worst nightmare. That was the political nightmare that gripped the Bush administration in the weeks after Katrina. As the National Post’s Colby Cosh put it, ‘‘The 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.’’93 Small wonder, then, that President Bush promptly sought the authority to head off future political disasters by overriding the decisions of state and local officials and using the military at home.”

PoliticsUs PoliticsDisastersGeorge W BushUs PresidentsHurrican Katrina
Book:The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Create image

“There was a revealing moment in the first presidential debate in September 2008, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates, ‘‘Are you willing to acknowledge, both of this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the States?’’Neither McCain nor Obama objected to Lehrer’s phrasing. Both, it seemed, perfectly comfortable with the idea that it’s the president’s job to ‘‘rule the country.”

PoliticsUs PoliticsPresidential DebatesUs Presidency
Book:The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Create image

“Over and over again, we begin by looking to the president as the solution to all our problems, and we end up believing he’s the source of all our problems. If history is any guide, when Obama fails to fully heal our financial troubles, stop the oceans’ rise, and rescue us from spiritual malaise, his hope-addled rhetoric will seem all the more grating, and the public will increasingly come to see him as the source of all American woes. As his popularity dwindles, many of Obama’s supporters will view attacks on him through the prism of race, forgetting or ignoring the fact that nearly every president eventually morphs from superhero to scapegoat in the public mind. Race will take on undue relevance because the presidency is far more powerful and far more important than it ought to be. Perhaps, then, we ought to rethink what we ask of”

PoliticsBarack ObamaUs PoliticsUs PresidentsUs Presidency
Book:The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Create image