Claire McCaskill Quotes

If you're running for president, you've got to do a lot of things to line up a candidacy. I've not done any of those things. It's not my plan. My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation.

Running for office is not easy. It's not enough to want it.

In an election campaign, sleep is for the weak.

Our opponents struggled manfully, desperately; but wind and tide were against them. They had campaign and other papers, good speakers, and large meetings; but we were far ahead of them in singing and electioneering emblems and mottoes which appealed to popular sympathies.

If you can’t run against a political candidate, run against his campaign manager.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

Don't fall in love with the map. The map doesn't win elections.

I would love to be a mentor to many people who want to go into the political arena, teach them the art of winning elections.

Campaigns are crazy things. They're half startup, half enterprise.

When you were a volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign, you came in the morning; you had a supervisor who gave you a list of calls to make and a time to do it in.

I was considering running for political office.

There are as many jobs for younger Americans as there are for other Americans of every age group in political campaigns. Campaigns are very labor intensive and volunteer dependent.

I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.

The point of a presidential campaign is to put the candidate through the ringer: to force him to get banged up by his opponents and the press, and to have to answer the difficult and uncomfortable questions, be investigated, and learn the thrust and parry of political swordplay.

It's tough campaigning, kissing hands and shaking babies.

I understand why the Tories will be gunning for Alastair Campbell because they fear his campaigning skills.

When you're putting together a campaign for president, like I've been, that entails a lot of time. It's not like I've been at the beach sipping a pina colada.

Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.

You don't win elections on Election Day. You win them by what you do all year round, by the day-to-day good will you generate in each precinct.

[On political campaigns:] Get an elbow, give an elbow.

Running for President of the United States requires everyone on the family working on it.

The first thing you've got to do in any kind of election campaign is be flexible.

Divide the floaters [undecided voters] into blocks of five and put a trusted man with necessary funds in charge of these five and make him responsible that none get away and that all vote our ticket.

[Describing a presidential campaign:] A three year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.

You should be strenuous in seeing as many people as possible every day of every possible class and order, for from the mere numbers of these you can make a guess of the amount of support you will get on the balloting