K&C Quotables

Some notable quotes from last night's Kudlow & Company:

An Ideological Gulf [If Obama is the Democratic nominee] this is going to be – ideologically – the greatest distinction that we’ve had in candidates since the 1980 election when Jimmy Carter ran against Reagan. The Republicans have actually selected probably about the best candidate that they could in John McCain—in terms of his ability to reach out to the centrist-moderate wing of the party. The Democrats, on the other hand, have moved way to the left. I’m not sure that Barack Obama can win those Reagan Democrats.

-Steve Moore, senior economics writer and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board

No Time to Turn Our Back There’s a fundamental problem in this country. I don’t think people understand two things that are important to us. One is, foreign markets are critically important to our future, for virtually every company. And second, we need foreign capital. This is not the time to be turning our back on the global economy. And also, the question is, if you want to renegotiate NAFTA, for instance, what are we prepared to put on the table? If it’s a negotiation, we’re going to have to give, if we want to get. What are we prepared to give? These kinds of questions really need to be addressed in a much more substantial way.

-Robert Hormats, Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International

Where’s the Beef? It’s very hard to predict what the future behavior would be of a person who’s had no past record of actually initiating anything. But what we do know about Senator Obama is he has the most liberal voting record of anybody in the Senate. Therefore, we can observe that he will go along with any left-wing scheme that comes along. While he’s never had a policy initiative of his own, we could expect that if he were to win the White House, he would take the initiatives that came out of Congress – an increasingly more liberal and emboldened Congress – and you’d get many left-wing schemes coming out of the House and Senate to his desk, which he would sign, and embrace, and call his own. [Obama] is a fascinating person. It’s so hard for me to understand how a person who is so wholly devoid of any on-the-job, policy accomplishment can take the job with these kinds of responsibilities, having demonstrated none in his life.

-Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey