"Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a 100-foot rope and then walk away with you unsaved looking for other good deeds to do."

If anyone knows who said this quote, please reply. Thank you!!

I found the quotation on one website:

Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.
-- Sen. S.I. Hayakawa
http://home.comcast.net/~ghaff/lword/libs.html

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? - The Bible, Matthew 16:26 :: NASB

We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.

Samuel D. Burchard (1812-91)
American resbyterian minister.
He said this during a speech at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York on October 29, 1884 in New York World 30 October 1884.

********************************************


littera scripta manet
the written word remains.
(the saying continues: 'The weak word perishes')

Another gentle reminder to give the Quoteland search feature a try first.
I got all over this quote in a previous post at
http://forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=586192041&f=099191541&m=3771980225&r=6381982225#6381982225
Where, in addition to the source that GB3000 found, I added the following:

I could find no reference to any source for the McCarthy citing (other than "used to say" and so forth), so I gave up on that.

But in the process, I stumbled on some fairly solid citings that give the original concept for this analogy to Senator Arthur Vandenberg. As in the following:

From The New Isolationism by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.,National Vice Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1952:

"Yet differences in degree in this field quickly become differences in principle, as Senator Vandenberg used to demonstrate with his story of the futility of throwing a fifteen-foot rope to a man drowning thirty feet from shore. The New Isolationism is the policy of the fifteen-foot rope."
~ Copyright © 1952 by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 1952; The New Isolationism; Volume 189, No. 5; pages 34-38.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/asiso.htm

Then there is:
When it came to domestic policy, there was very little that was confusing about Senator Robert Alfonso Taft of Ohio (1889-1953). A die-hard conservative, Taft remained up until his death a convinced enemy of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the assault on the Constitution which he believed it to represent. So solid were his political credentials that he came to be known widely as "Mr. Republican," defining the party itself in an era when the terms "Republican" and "neanderthal" were, in the eyes of many, synonymous.
[...]
After the war Taft became even more controversial as an early opponent of Cold War measures. When he dared criticize the Truman administration's increasing overseas commitments, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in 1952 accused him of espousing a "halfway" policy in resisting communism—a policy which the historian likened to throwing a fifteen-foot rope to a man drowning thirty feet from shore.
~ by John E. Moser at
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/dialogue/moser.html

In 1948, when President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall wanted to send billions of dollars in aid to Europe after the war, they turned to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Vandenberg won over colleagues on both sides of the aisle with common-sense arguments, like "When a man is drowning 20 feet away, it is a mistake to throw him a 15-foot rope."
~ U.S. Senator Zell Miller, D-GA
http://miller.senate.gov/oped/032501.htm

When defending the boldness of the Marshall Plan 50 years ago, Senator Arthur Vandenberg observed that it does little good to extend a 15-foot rope to a man drowning 20 feet away. Similarly, we cannot achieve our objectives in Bosnia by doing just enough to avoid immediate war; we must do all we can to help the people of Bosnia to achieve permanent peace.
~Madeleine K. Albright,
The Harvard Magazine
http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/ja97/albright.html

Truman formally presented the State Department's recovery proposal to Congress on December 19, 1947. It took months of congressional hearings and heated debates before the program was approved the following April as legislation called the Economic Cooperation Act.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Michigan) was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading supporter of the proposed legislation against isolationists led by Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio).
At one point in the Senate debate, Taft argued that the Marshall Plan would help socialism. Then he said he would support it but only with sharply reduced funding. Vandenberg snapped back "when a man is drowning 20 feetaway, it's a mistake to throw him a 15-foot rope" -- and he won the day.
~ Sonia Winter
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1997/05/F.RU.970526115758.html

When I was a freshman in college there was a statement written on the wall above my desk in the dorm room (Ellington Hall, UTM).

Richard M. Nixon is the only man I know whom if you were drowning 20 feet from shore, would throw you an 11 foot rope and say; "I had met him more than half way." (1975)

Below that statement there was graffito:

She was dripping with anticipation.

Thank you all for replying. That is who I thought said the quote, just wanted to make sure. Thanks again.