Barack Obama Quotes

The Democratic chairman doesn't need to be a household name. Most people didn't know who Ron Brown was when he was chairman of the Democratic Party, but he put the party in a position where Bill Clinton could come in and he had a solid base to run from.

I think when you look to the future what you'll find is that the Republican Party is building a bigger party base on stronger values.

I think the Democratic Party realizes, having lost two presidential elections, we need to do a better job of creating a farm team.

Democrats fell in love with the idea that winning elections was a matter of talking to voters about the one issue we think impacts them, instead of our plan to move the country forward as a whole.

Tim Kaine didn't come across authentic. It wasn't good. And it was - it just really - I think, for short-term benefit, I think the Democrats tarnished the brand, which is an awfully good brand.

For Democrats to win, they're going to have to address the needs of working people. They're going to have to address the needs of the middle class.

When people think, Democrats win.

I think Hillary [Clinton] hears the anger in a broad swath of the American people, and she says, "OK, how do I help create a future that's good for you?"

[Kellyanne] Conway had just explained how they won the presidency. They flipped over 200 counties, and she explained, "Did you ever think, Jennifer [Palmieri], that maybe the problem is that people just don't like your candidate, that Hillary [Clinton] doesn't connect with people, that maybe people don't have anything in common with Hillary, that maybe they see Hillary as a man?"

It was gonna be a race [2016] that set a foundation for the Left in the future. But given the math, I didn't think he was gonna make it. And so I started to shift to Hillary [Clinton] and to discussions of the platform and discussions of what to do.

I think, generally, the president's tweets are not helpful to him. At the same time, Donald Trump is figured out a way to communicate with people in ways that no other president has, or he wouldn't be president.

I think the Republican Party has indicated to everyone who wants to look at us that, you know, we're in the mainstream. We understand a lot of the concerns people have.

You don't deliberately submit people you love to something like that. I don't think I'd run again for vice-president. Next time I'd run for president.

When you're running for president you have to take some risks and you've got to show people something fresh and you've got to stay interesting.

I think a lot of people, not all of them, but a bunch of TV people put Donald Trump on television thinking he's making a fool of himself and thinking that he's making a fool of the GOP. I think early on that's what the Republican establishment thought. "Oh, let's hear more of this guy. He's just helping us left and right. He's digging his own grave here."

I think that's what's - one of the things that is alarming to me is [Donald] Trump, and I think Trump supporters seem to believe, he won, huge upset, full credit to him, and has got the wind at his back. And Republicans on The Hill do want him to succeed, obviously, and they're deferring to him more than they deep down in private sort of wish - want to, but they are going to defer to him publicly for awhile. But I think that is going to run out faster than people think.

It is an evil time but it is a complex time because we do not have uniforms standing in front of us. Instead, we have people in disguise. It is brutal. This ISIS thing - it is something we are going to devote a lot of energy to it. I think we are going to be very successful.

I think you learn more about Donald Trump when you learn more about his wife Melania. She can say things, but it's more how much did you get to know her and believe the kind of person she is, that could be married successfully to him. So once you realize that there's something there, that there's substance and that she's got talents and abilities, you think "this is a very complex woman and not just a pretty face" and you know they have a pretty successful marriage and I think that speaks well of him.

I think a core principle of the Democratic Party has to be a defense of equal rights for every American. At the same time, when you look at the election, and not just the 2016 election, but the elections to come, Democrats have to do better than we did in 2016 in communities, in rural communities where people feel like they've been in a slow burn recession or depression for years, not just months.

The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so.

I'm not as serious of a person as people make me out to be. Most people would think that I would be less successful in comedy, but I can crack a joke as well as anyone else.

I think a primary always makes the other candidate a better candidate because you're battle-tested and you have to think in ways that other people are thinking in addition to your own vision, how to incorporate some fresher, newer thinking into all of that.

So many people are paralyzed by worrying, "What are these people going to think?"

Do people think I'm cool because I was in a movie when I was a child? No. Well, maybe a little bit more than they used to. There's definitely a nostalgia factor.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.