“He hasn't had the experience of running statewide elections, much less winning them. When you come from a district with 11 percent Republicans where the whole ball game is winning the Democratic primary, you don't develop the instincts you need for statewide politics.”
“Phil better take notice. If he wants to try to replicate the Roberti campaign of 1994, he's up against a team that knows how to fight back. I've been accused of a lot of things, but not being willing to fight back isn't one of them.”
“You do not come back from those depths just by making some shifts here and there and cherry-picking a few issues you think are popular. It just isn't that easy. The notion that you can just snap your fingers after falling from the high 60s to the low 30s, that you can give a speech, propose some infrastructure spending and say some things that you think pull you back to the center is naive in the extreme.”
“They can't snap their fingers and do symbolic things and turn it all around. It ain't that easy -- particularly when you have the antipathy that now exists against him.”
“In both cases, he did it with very strong bipartisan backing. But they wrongly and foolishly extrapolated from the recall and the Prop. 57-58 and 66 campaigns that this guy was a masterful campaigner who could sell ice to Eskimos and could sell pork pies in a synagogue.”