Barack Obama Quotes

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.

I'm not going to speculate.I'm just going to run my campaign, talk about what I'm doing and why I think I'd be the best president of any of the candidates on either side.

I think whoever runs next time has to have a very clear idea of where he or she wants to take America and has to run on those ideas, because the election cannot be about personalities, participants sniping, all of the irrelevant stuff the day after the election sort of dissipates, and you wake up and say, okay, now what am I going to do?

I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.

We need to send Barack Obama back to Chicago - I'd like to send him back to Kenya, back to Indonesia. But not only that - we absolutely need to retake the Senate. It is imperative that we take the Senate.

I'm running for president because I want to change the direction of this country, and it will require me for the time being to miss some votes in the U.S.

An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy country.

There is a route to the presidency in this country, and it's called the Electoral College, and both candidates base their campaigns on winning the Electoral College, not the popular vote. And in that pursuit, Donald Trump won in a landslide or near landslide. And in that pursuit, Barack Obama and his agenda was repudiated. And not just this year. In the 2010 midterms, the 2014 midterms, and this election.

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

The media theme was, "June is when you win the presidency," because that's what they thought Hillary [Clinton] was doing. Hillary was running ads condemning [Donald] Trump, characterizing Trump, marginalizing Trump.

Donald Trump told ABC news that if he had Oprah as a running mate, they could easily win. Although you know who'd definitely win? Oprah WITHOUT Donald Trump.

For 17 years, elections in Russia have followed the same pattern: Nobody criticizes Putin, nobody runs a real election campaign, the whole process takes place quietly over a period of two months. The Kremlin blocks every alternative to Putin. He doesn't want a candidate who will travel through the country and speak loudly about Russia's problems.

One of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is the given population distribution across the country. We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grassroots level, something that's been a running thread in my career.

The elections have a different platform, the town hall is the platform for it. But the other question behind all this is should I run for president?

When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn't, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he's running up against is the State Department.

I do think that campaigns are about electing somebody, but they're also about a discussion of the future of our country.

When I left the secretary of state office, I had a 69% approval rating. Once I start running for office and all the incoming you know is battering away, people are going to say, "Hey, wait a minute - what's that mean, what's that mean?" I get all of that, but I don't think we do any service to our country or the voters if we descend into the kind of insult fest that he seems to relish.

If someone wants to run a campaign about '90s nostalgia, it's not going to be very successful.

Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter has filed papers to run for president. But in his official filing, he misspelled the word 'president.' Political experts say it's all part of Hunter's plan to attract Bush supporters.

Democrats, if they're smart and they're not brain-dead, are doing two things right now.They're having self-deprecating humor written for them. There was no humor in Cleveland. And they are not making this a Donald Trump.

I'm having my platform run up by a movie set designer, so it will be very impressive from the front, but not too premanent. After all, there's no sense putting a lot of time and thought into something you'll have no use for after you're elected.

If you're going to run for president as the anti-Clinton, you should know that Democrats and their media friends will do whatever it takes to make you look Clintonian... The questions won't go away because Democrats are desperate to define Republican deviancy down to Clinton levels. The ugliness is just getting started.

Hillary's [Clinton] been doing a good job of portraying [Donald] Trump as unqualified, not the right temperament.

If a country can only be rich by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once, perish such riches!

In a new campaign ad, Jeb Bush referenced 'The Godfather' and said his nickname used to be 'Veto Corleone' because he vetoed so many bills in Florida. When you're the third person in your family to run for president, maybe you shouldn't bring up a movie trilogy where the third one was clearly the worst.