But if the Republicans are ready to "dial back the crazy," as one headline recently put it, issues of substance might have a better chance of percolating to the top.
As Times columnist Frank Bruni put it, by issuing "repressive rules about what people should be able to say and hear," students at this liberal college in fact displayed illiberalism.
As Senator John Edwards, a centrist North Carolina Democrat put it, "Mainstream issues are going to be the big issues that are brought to the floor".
As one executive board member of the historians group, Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University, put it, "This issue is causing many of us to lose sleep".
As Churchill somberly put it, "Stupendous issues are unfolding before our eyes, and we are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world".
But like the gold wall-to-wall carpeting Mr. Moorhead and Ms. McCluskey are painstakingly ripping up (having "stabilized," as Mr. Moorhead put it, structural issues like the roof and the plumbing), their personalities loom large and are hard to excavate.
Or as Lund put it: "The issue here is that around holidays one needs to be extra careful, and there is extra exposure, because there is some partying going on.
As Jay H. Leve of the independent polling firm SurveyUSA put it, "The issue is a loser for Republicans in primary states such as New Hampshire and a sure loser for Republicans in the general election".
The precise location of such quarters is, as one local official put it, a "huge issue," because state and federal payments flow to where the people are.
As Dean Maki, the chief United States economist at Barclays Capital, put it: "The basic issue is that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal track, which is pretty widely agreed upon.
