Nina Easton Quotes

It's true that many of the leaders who started at non-elite colleges as undergrads later attended prominent graduate schools in law, business, medicine, and so on. But the point is that they found their own way there - as young men and women in their early 20s, not teenagers pressed into action by parents and peers.

- Nina Easton

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a platform of 'ending welfare as we know it.' His political worldview, drawn from like-minded thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council, was based in private sector growth and personal responsibility.

- Nina Easton

The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

- Nina Easton

Birth mothers choose life, and a family, for their child. But this choice is rarely celebrated. Women routinely face family, friends and even health-care providers who think that adoption equals abandonment, according to researchers and conversations with birth mothers.

- Nina Easton

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

- Nina Easton

The guardians of your company's cyber security should be encouraged to network within the industry to swap information on the latest hacker tricks and most effective defenses.

- Nina Easton

It's become glib political conventional wisdom in Washington that a massive spending plan will provide a parachute rescue for a cliff-diving economy - landing it safely and with strong enough legs to move toward a healthy future.

- Nina Easton

Every journalist loves a peaceful protest -whether it makes news, shakes up a political season, or holds out the possibility of altering history.

- Nina Easton

Jobless workers, especially those out of work for months and years, don't have the skills to multitask in a fast-paced economy where medical workers need to know electronic record-keeping, machinists need computer skills, and marketing managers can no longer delegate software duties.

- Nina Easton

Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between.

- Nina Easton

We know that inflation distorts economic behavior. In the 1970s, a combination of high tax rates and inflation prompted investors to flee production in favor of protection.

- Nina Easton

One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing.

- Nina Easton

The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth.

- Nina Easton

Sea World's killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean.

- Nina Easton

Shamu the killer whale is Sea World's Mickey Mouse; whales named Shamu are the star attractions of three parks and the focus of their marketing efforts.

- Nina Easton

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

- Nina Easton

Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.

- Nina Easton

When I visited the Water Institute's Baton Rouge offices overlooking the Mississippi River, I couldn't find a drop of the charged politics that drives so many environmental conversations in Washington.

- Nina Easton

A huge segment of the country has always felt overtaxed. In 1938, when taxes were roughly 17% of income, a 'Fortune' survey found that nearly half of all Americans thought they paid too much relative to what they got in return.

- Nina Easton

If you like Obama, if you like a Washington that offers free stuff and taxing the rich, that's what you get. I don't see him evolving as a president.

- Nina Easton

Presidential coverage used to be a very serious endeavor.

- Nina Easton

A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics.

- Nina Easton

The mission of Patrick Henry College was to attract and cultivate academic stars from the ranks of home-schooled evangelicals, then send them off on graduation day to 'shape the culture and take back the nation,' in the words of a common home-schooling rallying cry.

- Nina Easton

Ralph Reed is deeply ambitious and always was so. There was a time when he... in one of my interviews, he said he pondered running the Ross Perot campaign, and he wasn't sure he wanted to do the Christian Right thing; he was worried that it boxed him into a corner.

- Nina Easton

The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets.

- Nina Easton

Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.

- Nina Easton

In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements.

- Nina Easton

Barack Obama's political roots are liberal, but he has always resisted buying into the brand of liberalism that denigrates American greatness and potential.

- Nina Easton

In the fall of 1996, I sat inside weekly strategy meetings of conservative activists as part of research for my book, 'Gang of Five,' chronicling the rise of the baby-boomer Right.

- Nina Easton

Main Street versus Wall Street was the 2008 economic mantra of Democrat Barack Obama.

- Nina Easton

The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed.

- Nina Easton

Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent.

- Nina Easton

The Citizens United ruling did not invent special-interest spending; it enables corporations and unions to advocate directly on behalf of a candidate rather than running more subtle 'issue ads.'

- Nina Easton

Events like Hurricane Katrina and the Minnesota bridge collapse suggest a national infrastructure that has suffered from lack of tending.

- Nina Easton

A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.

- Nina Easton

Disability has become a form of permanent welfare for a lot of folks. It's not that hard to prove a mental illness or mental issues or pain issues.

- Nina Easton

I've been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught - from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.

- Nina Easton

Our pride is tied up in being right. We tend to favor data that confirm our beliefs, so we don't see alternatives. Too often, leaders practice defense routines that become self-reinforcing.

- Nina Easton

We know this much about how Barack Obama plans to govern: He will deploy the fattest checkbook ever at the disposal of an incoming American president.

- Nina Easton

Government pensions, built into law and mostly protected from stock market vagaries, are the envy of the private sector.

- Nina Easton

Direct mail was the basis of a lot of new Right organizations in the '70s and early '80s, and it actually led to the downfall of the majority of them. It's very expensive, and you end up putting your organization more and more in debt if you're not successful with it.

- Nina Easton

A woman's decision to carry a baby to term knowing that she will not reap the fruits of motherhood should be treated as an act of bravery and selflessness - the ultimate standards of good motherhood.

- Nina Easton

Message to all you crazed parents desperately hiring tutors and padding your kid's thin resume: Chillax. Attending an elite college is no guarantee of leadership, life success, or earnings potential.

- Nina Easton

To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.

- Nina Easton

The discovery of heroes is rarely linear or obvious. They usually sneak up on you.

- Nina Easton

If you want to know how Hillary Clinton could try to distance herself from President Obama's much-criticized foreign policy, listen closely to the words of her former top strategist, Anne-Marie Slaughter.

- Nina Easton

In the new economy, we all have to be entrepreneurs with our own lives - with all the rewards and risks and, yes, anxieties that entails.

- Nina Easton

Adoption should be an empowering option for young women in crisis, knowing that the people around them - family, friends, church - will respect their choice.

- Nina Easton

Economically, long-term joblessness means fewer dollars for consumption. For deficit control, it means fewer taxpayers contributing to government revenues and tens of billions more spent on unemployment insurance.

- Nina Easton

'George' exploits John Kennedy Jr.'s cult of celebrity at a time when Americans are hungry for icons, not heroes.

- Nina Easton

Community colleges are popular among political leaders of both parties. But because of the lack of funding and a lack of direction, they have lost their critical edge in preparing workers for a 21st-century economy.

- Nina Easton

Modern Americans - shaped by raucous politics and a rapacious media - like to think of themselves as experts in confronting mistakes.

- Nina Easton

Fame legitimizes. Being conspicuous gets confused with being illustrious.

- Nina Easton

Your company is probably going to get hacked. The velocity and complexity of hacking attempts has skyrocketed, with companies routinely facing millions of knocks on the vault door.

- Nina Easton

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.

- Nina Easton

Successful candidates follow a simple fundamental rule: Define yourself before your opponent can define you.

- Nina Easton

Reality shows serve up juicy drama out of human shortcomings.

- Nina Easton

In 1996, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over in the State of the Union address.

- Nina Easton

I think the danger with the liberal Left is seeing the Republican Party as a monolith.

- Nina Easton

Presidents can be judged by the company they choose to keep.

- Nina Easton

We like to think of women as peacemakers, not purveyors of violence.

- Nina Easton

Great leaders don't rush to blame. They instinctively look for solutions.

- Nina Easton

I've made decisions along the way so I would be there for my kids, and it's kept me from going places I would have gone.

- Nina Easton

We like to think that a free market's greatest strength is its self-corrective nature.

- Nina Easton