Politics & Power Quote by Dick Morris

Weaponizing agreement is one of the oldest tricks in the American political playbook, and Dick Morris frames it with the blunt confidence of a strategist who’s spent years treating ideology as stagecraft. “Yes” isn’t moral enlightenment here; it’s jujitsu. The line assumes politics is less a clash of convictions than a contest over initiative: whoever defines the agenda forces the other side into a reactive crouch. Say “no” and you look like an obstacle. Say “yes” (selectively, strategically) and you steal the spotlight.

The subtext is triangulation, pure and unapologetic: absorb just enough of your opponent’s popular ideas to neutralize their attack lines, then reposition yourself as the reasonable adult in the room. Morris isn’t praising bipartisanship so much as describing a form of rhetorical disarmament. If you adopt “the positions which animate” the other side, you don’t merely compromise; you deprive them of their animating fuel. Their outrage machine loses its headline. Their donors lose their villain. Their messaging collapses into “Well, not like that.”

Context matters because this is an insight born from late-20th-century media politics, when message discipline, polling, and cable-news combat rewarded momentum over coherence. The quote flatters American voters as allergic to negativity while quietly conceding how easy it is to manipulate that preference. It’s not about consensus; it’s about rendering the opposition inarticulate by taking their nouns away and leaving them only adjectives: “fake,” “weak,” “not enough.”