18 Quotes by Norm Ornstein

It's not in the backs of their minds about Jim Wright, it's in the front of their minds, ... They see the parallel here and they want to be sure this doesn't happen.

It's not what you really want at a time when the public is not very happy with you.

It turns out to be more important than we thought, ... We're at a stage now in the modern media where everything is so fragmented that the only things that bring us together in the public square are tragedies or disasters .. We look for someone to reassure us of a common purpose.

They are very much afraid that if DeLay comes back in the leadership and then this stuff explodes all around them, the shrapnel is going to hit all of them. Even those who admire his leadership ... they are going to want to pull out.

They want a group of people on the House Ethics Committee who are going to go to extraordinary lengths to keep Tom DeLay from going down or being embarrassed yet again, which embarrasses them all, they believe, with whats been going on down in Texas.

I'm happy to place the lion's share of the blame for this on FEMA and the feds. But I think a substantial dollop of the blame goes to the state and local level, and he deserves his share of that.

Before election night or the next morning, I would have said the chances for a rematch are zero, that the loser would be quickly forgotten. But we're in a different world now.

He's putting a marker down that an awful lot of his colleagues have been unwilling to do.

You've got a lot of people who privately view DeLay as so radioactive. It's not just the Texas stuff, in some ways the Texas stuff is the least of it.