Quote

For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

From a distance, the American political system is a remarkable success. We have accomplished the peaceful transfer of power for more than two hundred years, and that's unmatched by any civilization in human history. Up close, our political system still has all the ugliness and bad actors that you might suspect.

If it wasn't for what goes on in the world of politics, we wouldn't really have much of a show.

What might be good for ratings can be bad for the country. The hard-core partisans are self-segregating themselves into separate political realities. But the majority of Americans are starting to wake up to the game.

Our political system needs changing. It needs to move away from personalities and patronage to a system of party programs and consultation with the people.

A great many of us have been concerned about the presidential nomination system... whether or not we have drifted into a system that simply doesn't work so well any more.

Politics is about the participation and engagement of the wider citizenry - to miss that point would doom us to irrelevance.

I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that this system has served us well over the centuries, that our parliamentary traditions have combined stability and flexibility and that we should not cast away in a minute what has taken generations to build.