Robert E. Sherwood Quotes

Candidates are making lasting impressions on voters, not just primary voters, in how they campaign.

Re-election campaigns of sitting presidents are always about the sitting president.

In the absence of formal written platforms, the antecedents of candidates become their platforms. On just such platforms all our earlier and better Presidents were elected.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

In an age when stagecraft, gauzy themes, and sound-bites have too often been substituted for leadership, Bill Clinton as a candidate made it essential to campaigning to take the specifics of governance seriously. Practical solutions were 'in;' ideology was 'out.'

Despite my excellent mood, I don't have any sympathy for Romney. If he'd been a good candidate he wouldn't have had a different campaign for every month on the calendar.

I have never run a negative political ad in my life.

There ain't any first-raters this year .... We don't have any John Shermans or Theodore Roosevelts. We've got a lot of second-raters and Warren G. Harding is the best of the second-raters.

A 30 second negative ad can matter more to a candidate's career than a lifetime voting record.

For the Presidency, you run on a record and not on your legs.

What is politics but persuading the public to vote for this and support that and endure these for the promises of those.

Anybody who says negative commercials are wrong and shouldn't be used doesn't know anything about politics. The fact is people respond to those commercials.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself.

Roosevelt knew never to lose control of the majority of American opinion, unlike his greatest democratic contemporaries, Churchill and De Gaulle, who at times suffered spectacular rejections by their electorates.

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

Look at those Republican [Presidential Primary Nomination] debates. I feel embarrassed as an American when I hear them orate.

We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.

Of course the Liberal Democrats are going to say things to try and get attention - but I don't think the country is paying much attention.

I think always, when you have a candidate promising free stuff, and another promising less stuff or nothing, the one who promises more is always going to have the advantage.

In politics, name recognition matters a lot.

The infamous political ads like Carly Fiorina's 'Demon Sheep' and Christine O'Donnell's 'I Am Not a Witch' are so confusing, it's almost like they were paid for by Democrats.

Hillary Clinton cannot be honest, in a nationwide campaign, about what she's gonna do. She wouldn't get 30% of the vote, maybe 40, if she did. Just like Obama didn't. Obama didn't campaign on 90% of the stuff that he ended up doing. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change - I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect.

In politics, familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It breeds votes.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.