Politics & Power Quote by Robert Novak

It’s a partisan one-liner with the snap of a newsroom punchline: politics as costume party, ideology as drag. Novak’s “elephants in donkey’s clothes” isn’t just an insult aimed at Democrats; it’s a warning to conservatives that the label “Democrat” has stopped being a reliable signal of policy. The joke works because it compresses a complicated realignment story into a barnyard image anyone can decode in a second: the animal is what matters, not the outfit.

The specific intent is to argue that Democrats, in Novak’s view, had absorbed the governing instincts of old-school Republicans: deference to business, national security hawkishness, fiscal caution, technocratic managerialism. Think late-20th-century triangulation and “New Democrat” branding, where winning suburban moderates required sounding tough on crime, friendly to markets, and allergic to big, messy redistributive promises. Novak, a conservative columnist with deep sourcing in Washington, is also flexing insider authority: he’s implying he can see through the branding better than ordinary voters can.

Subtextually, it’s an accusation of political fraud and a nudge toward cynicism. If Democrats have become “the old Republican Party,” then partisan loyalty becomes naive, and politics becomes a contest of marketing teams fighting over the same donors and the same assumptions. The line also carries a strategic edge: it pressures Republicans to stop treating Democrats as ideological opposites and start treating them as competitors on Republican terrain, which is a different kind of fight.

Context matters because Novak is speaking from an era when party coalitions were visibly shifting and “who’s who” in American politics felt newly unstable. The metaphor turns that instability into a simple, slightly contemptuous certainty.