Mara Liasson Quotations

The establishment is divorcing itself from its base - from voters who are choosing a candidate who says he stands for things that are anathema to the establishment.

The GOP establishment, in particular, is facing a pick-your-poison kind of decision. Many establishment Republicans dislike [Ted] Cruz personally. He has no Senate endorsements.

Ted Cruz is a small-government conservative.

Michael Rubio said Trump's plan was impulsive and not well thought out. The other thing that's really annoying Republicans is that this was supposed to be their great week. The president gave a speech on terrorism that was not well received. They were working hard to tie Hillary Clinton to the president. Then along comes Donald Trump, and the story changes dramatically.

People like Ted Cruz, who has tried to position himself as the best second choice for [Donald] Trump supporters, wouldn't condemn him.

I think that's why we see this mixed reaction - Republican congressional leaders like Paul Ryan speaking out very firmly, but Republican candidates not as much, with the exception of the candidates in the single digits like Jeb Bush or Lindsey Graham, who said how to make America great again tell - Donald Trump to go to hell.

As one person said to me , Republicans know [Donald] Trump is a stain on their party.

There's disgust with what people called a broken political system, and they're really angry at elites, whether it's the Republican establishment or particularly the media who they feel look down on them, tell them they're bigots.

There was tremendous animus to President [Barack] Obama. Many of people said he was un-American, not a Christian and worse.

There's a lot of anxiety about terrorism among the country at large. There's also a feeling the country has stagnated.

The enthusiasm for [Donald] Trump had gone up. The net result was it made people more supportive of him.

If the Congress is going to spend its whole time hauling up regulators and bureaucrats and looking like they're focusing on tiny, trivial things, instead of jobs and the economy, it could be a problem for them.

Republicans like Trent Lott, saying [Donald] Trump would be more flexible [then Ted Cruz].

Republicans think that [Ted] Cruz would be like Barry Goldwater. He'd lose in a landslide and pull the party down with him. They'd lose Senate and House seats.

The base has chosen or is choosing a candidate that the establishment says is absolutely unacceptable. And what that means is this marriage of an elite, big business-backed establishment and a blue-collar, downwardly mobile base has really come to a divorce.

Well, it's possible that the new infusion of ad money against Donald Trump kept his margins in Kentucky and Louisiana down a bit. But we're also seeing something that we've never seen in 100 years, which is we are seeing the crackup of a major American political party.

Well, we had a bunch of primaries and caucuses on the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders won the Nebraska and Kansas caucuses. That keeps his campaign alive. But Hillary Clinton won Louisiana, which was the big prize of the night, so she ended up winning more delegates than he did yesterday.

[Mike] Bloomberg aides says he's more likely to run if it's [Donald]Trump or [Ted] Cruz versus Sanders, then there would, presumably, be space in the middle for him. But he's less likely to go if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

Hillary Clinton is also not a very exciting, inspiring candidate to a lot of the left-leaning Democratic base, especially in Iowa.

The country wants the president and the Congress focused on jobs and the economy. Any regulation that the president promulgates that isn't focused on, I think, is a risk for him, and the same is true for Congress.

The lesson is that voters in both parties are in a very anti-establishment, populist mood. Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate.

You have [Donald] Trump and [Ted] Cruz battling it out, and the moderate establishment candidates like Chris Christie or Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich - they have formed a circular firing squad.

The Republican Party, right now, is a conservative populist party.

Jeb Bush was supposed to be the establishment candidate, but he didn't catch on. And the extraordinary thing about this Republican primary is that the establishment, moderate wing of the party has sidelined itself. They're not coalescing around one candidate as they have in the past.

On the other side, you have the conservative intelligentsia - magazines like National Review, which has a big anti-Trump issue; Weekly Standard editor, conservative talk show hosts - they're mounting a big anti-Trump effort, pro-Cruz effort because they think [Donald] Trump is dangerous and he's not qualified to be commander in chief.

For a long time, many Republicans thought if they just took two aspirin and laid down, [Donald] Trump would go away.

Many people feel he did cross a line in a way he hadn't even done before and also that Republicans had to speak out because they believe Trump poses a danger to the party.

While Romney has an overall deficit with women voters, his biggest disadvantage is with college educated women - wherever they work, at home, in an office, a store or a factory.

After months and months at the top of the polls, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump could be the nominee.

The president is under 50 percent approval ratings in all the battleground states. So, you could say that President Obama is defying gravity by still being in a dead heat with Mitt Romney. And one of the reasons that he is, is because the changing face of the electorate are giving him a small boost.

Romney still enjoys the Republicans' traditional advantage among voters who are veterans, but the Obama campaign is confident it can chip away at that.

Obama has built his public image around his ability to bridge divisions - racial, ideological or generational. And that was his reputation, even at Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the 'Law Review.

As one conservative intellectual said to me - he said if the choice is between [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler, I'd pick Stalin, meaning Ted Cruz because he's more predictable. So there's real civil war inside the Republican Party.

Obama's even keel sometimes comes across as aloof or even cold.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns said they pulled all their political ads today in observance of the September 11th anniversary. But politics wasn't very far offstage. The Obama campaign sees foreign policy as an advantage this year.

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children.