Sunday Sound: Heard on 'This Week'

Here are the best lines from 'This Week' roundtable.

ByABC News
April 8, 2012, 3:13 PM

NEW YORK, April 8, 2012— -- Below is a list of some of the notable things said on the "This Week" roundtable.

Game On: Obama and Romney Launch Negative Attacks

1) CHALIAN: What struck me is that the two candidates now for the general election have launched on a negative frame of each other. This is not going to be a campaign -- and I don't mean to bemoan negative campaigning, we know it works and we know it's effective. But this is not going to be a campaign it seems based on a prescriptive, positive vision about what they're each going to do in 2013 should they take office. This is clearly a negative frame. On the policy, each side is trying to call the other out of the mainstream, but also in that clip you just played, Jake, on character, they're in a battle to try to convince the American public the other is more out of touch. And so by building this negative frame as the launch week of the general election, I'm not very hopeful that we're going to have much more of a positive vision going forward.

2) NOONAN: I heard the beginning of what is going to be a tough and maybe even brutal campaign…… The president -- first of all, I wasn't that aware that Mr. Romney has started his campaign, but boy, it's obvious that Mr. Obama has. He was tough. He was stark. He was dividing and labeling. Normally at this point, a candidate for the presidency, an incumbent candidate, will take a more benign, embracing tone. There was none of that. It was stark, dividing, us versus them, and that suggests brutal days ahead for the next seven months, I think.

3) DYSON: I think also his {Romney's} problems with women are huge. I mean, the tone-deaf character of Republican rhetoric about female contraception, about their relationship to the state, about who owns their uterus and how their health care is supported is incredibly discouraging when you hear from a Republican candidate who shows no sensitivity and has only personal and existential references to his wife in his own $100, $200 million home…

Reactions to Obama Challenging the Supreme Court not to Overturn his Signature Health Care Law

4) DYSON: If you can't deal with this reasoned, articulate expression of difference and dissent and calling that bullying. And on the one hand Obama has to be worried about, I can't be an angry black man. I can't speak up in a certain way. He's already constrained by the stereotypes that prevail. If you can't even take his dissent as an expression of legitimate disagreement and instead of ascribing to him bullying, I don't see how...

FREELAND: You think being black has made the president less effective?DYSON: Well, it's made his job much more difficult because even white liberals who support him, obviously play into certain racial scripts. Black people who support him -- and -- and across the board, I think it's very difficult for the president to be able to maneuver because he has to be so concerned. He can focus on the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, but can't necessarily highlight the 44th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. There are choices to be made. I think he's done an extraordinarily interesting and powerful job of it. But I think the constraints are not his, but imposed on him from the outside.