Mercedes Schlapp Quotes

The most successful politicians are the ones who embrace their best traits while turning their liabilities into loveable attributes. And yet, many a candidate tries to run as something they aren't simply because the strategy dictates it.

I think Clinton fatigue was a real thing. It's just hard to get comfortable with Gore - it was hard for him to project who he is, the person people know in private.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

You certainly don't want to market the president as if he or she were a box of breakfast cereal.

Don't worry about polls, but if you do, don't admit it.

Did I say that the President's entire job is image management? Of course not.

We all know that looks matter, and modern politicians have always assumed that their battles are decided on both substance and image.

Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.

No, no, no. Dick Cheney forbade me to waste time on his image. I would have liked to have done more.

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

If you can’t run against a political candidate, run against his campaign manager.

You're not trying to win 100 percent of the vote. You're after 50 percent plus one. It doesn't matter if you tick off the other 49 percent.

When you run a campaign the idea is not to appeal to pundits but to appeal to people.

Nixon's pretense was to be less than he was—less thoughtful, less introverted, less skeptical and analytical, less cerebral—to present himself deliberately as an Average American: patriotic, conventionally religious and responsible, gregarious, sports-loving, hardworking and hard-nosed.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

Political debates, which are considered central to modern American political campaigns, appear useless as they put pressure on each candidate to put on some sort of act, to show in an impossibly brief time a superior, distinctive personality and command of the issues; the debates therefore are…fake

It’s not only what you do in politics. It’s what you appear to do.

He appeals to their imagination; I do not. He is a real vivid person whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong: I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

The losing side is comforted, I think, by this idea of magical gurus [masterminding the opponent’s campaign], because it’s less disconcerting than the fact that people just didn’t like them very much.

It’s the [political] consultants’ job to take who the person is—their fixed characteristics—and leverage it.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president. Trump knows psychology.

Campaigns are about adjustments.

I think the Reagan people are superb marketers. Their whole approach to polling, to television, to the symbolism and the rest approaches genius.

If I can convince people that good people don't do attack ads, and that we want good people to represent us, then the attack ads work against themselves.