James Carville Quotes

The message is pretty clear: Americans are sick and tired of the doubletalk coming out of Washington, of us going home and saying we're conservative and then coming up here and voting for 10,000 earmarks. We can't fool America anymore; the media is too good. They're reporting what we're really doing.

But in this Congress, accountability is just a catch phrase, usually directed elsewhere. Demands to personal responsibility or corporate accountability abound, but rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility.

I think when you've been in office for a long time, you have a record, and that record is fair game.

Certainly accountability of government is what people are clamoring for; they want to know that when lawmakers make a promise or a proposal, you can actually accomplish it.

Washington doesn't have just a spending problem, or just an entitlement problem, or just a taxing problem. We have a leadership problem. Fix that, and the first three problems are solved.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Our national leaders could learn some good habits and important lessons from city hall to take the place of the various gimmicks being used in Washington to duck federal budget responsibility.

Negative politics in a primary campaign produces damaged goods but you've got to do what you've got to do.

We are hiring too many people who are called politicians, and we are not holding them accountable…. You do not hire someone and not tell them what to do. Make a trip to Washington and see that they are doing what you want them to do.

Frankly, I'm fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about family values. Our families have values. But our government doesn’t.

Tony Blair was a good politician but not a good Prime Minister, and that's what we don't want to be. We don't want to be just people who are good at winning elections: we want to be good at governing. I think we benefit from having seen the mistakes that we think Tony Blair made in 1997.

If you're not the establishment candidate, they're going to attack you some ways.

If Congress can't get a budget passed when they're supposed to, it's just common sense they shouldn't get paid.

People should not be paid to go to Washington and not do their job. When they don't show up, why should we pay them?

There's a coalition of folks here in Georgia who want representation that's focused on local economic development and on accountability and not on the partisan circus in Washington.

I promised to carry on Jeff Session's legacy of fighting for the conservative values we believe in. I promised to help pass the Trump agenda and serve the people's interest, not the special interests. And I promised to help Donald Trump drain the swamp in Washington.

Performance or no performance, perceptions do matter. More so the voters's perceptions on the performance of their state governments.

Modi could have done wonders in the country because he had a majority government. He, however, only changed the names of the schemes implemented by the Congress.

You've got to attract interest in your candidate. The problem when you're running far behind is that you've got to move through those positive phases very quickly. Then, you have to draw attention to the other guy. You've got to create interest in why you differ from him and you've got to create a desire to remove him.

They don't want to get dirty and they know that Trump loves this kind of thing. And your polls, and yours are what's giving them the material that they need, it's the oxygen that the Trump campaign requires, a poll every three or four days showing him where he is.

The most effective way to beat Hillary Clinton is to remind voters of Hillary Clinton's behavior.

You asked Marco Rubio if it was too little too late. I think there's a little bit of too much too late, which is, he is just getting down in the muck with Donald Trump. And when you get down in the muck, you get up with muck on you.

[Barack Obama and Susan Rice] simply do not want any hearings on Benghazi, and they wouldn't be able to avoid it if she's up there as secretary of state.

I won't raise taxes, because I do not want to punish the people for the politicians' mistakes.

If you don't have a record to run on, you paint your opponent as someone to run from.