Paul F. Tompkins Quotes

I don't believe in gutter politics. I don't believe in gutter journalism.

In an interview with a journalist, you look petty taking the pot shot but in a slick ad you can really do damage - including unfair damage - from afar. It is not that much different than waging a war by a drone than by hand-to-hand combat.

There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you've got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse to bring down the opposing candidate.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.

There's so much mudslinging going on, and people get so turned off by that. It seems like neither party is aware of that. They're too concerned with blasting each other.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

Politics ... is going to be diluted down into a 10-second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out of there.

If a negative ad is run against you and you don't answer it, it becomes the truth.

[Commenting on negative campaigning:] On the eve of the first Tuesday in November, once again we are faced with the ugly paradox of 30-second-spot democracy: to prove they are worthy of governing us in all that we hold dear, America's politicians must behave in a way that proves they aren't.

Fratricide dominates our public debate, and America is held hostage with tactics of smear and fear.

[Huey Long is] suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That's presuming Emperor Long has an intellect.

Unless you are a prohibitive front-runner, an unanswered smear is believed.

[In a political contest,] the first guy who defines the other, wins

People really don’t care if politicians attack each other with untrue stories. They figure if you don’t want to get hurt, you shouldn’t have filed for office. They figure whatever happens to us, our lives will be better than theirs.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.

Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar's Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.

Negative campaigning is wrong.

There was a slow-motion swift boating of Hillary Clinton in '15.

In campaigns, lots of things will be said, and what they have said about my husband is just simply not true.

On the road to the GOP nomination, Trump earned the reputation as a good debater by slandering and bullying his opponents, knocking them out with cheap shots and lies. On a crowded stage, Trump got away with these deplorable tactics.

In a political campaign, you take your position; you stay strong with it. And the Clinton campaign put out tons of stuff that was not true about Donald Trump and who President Trump is.

In business, as in politics, the public is ever so tolerant of those who slime.

It wasn't the first time. This happened to Dennis Kucinich. It happened to Jesse Jackson. They did it even to Howard Dean, creating the Dean scream. This is how they [democrats] work.

I trust in due time to lay the perfidy, meanness, and wickedness of [Henry] Clay naked before the American people. I have lately got an intimation of some of his secret movements, which, if I can reach with positive and responsible proof, I will wield to his political, and perhaps his actual, destruction.

He who slings mud generally loses ground.