Mike Pence Quotes

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

I hate negative ads in general.

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

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.

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.

For an office-seeker [candidate], sticks and stones are greatly to be preferred to an adhesive adjective.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

One of the most overused phrases in political commentary is that someone is running a 'negative' campaign filled with 'attack' ads.

Well, you know, in any political campaign, you're gonna have people on one side that are gonna slip a reporter something because they think it'll hurt the guy on the other side.

There's a reason people run negative ads... it's because they work.

The minute you announce as a candidate, your opponents go on a deep sea fishing expedition for your sins.

I'm not the inventor of negative campaigning, but I'm an ardent practitioner.

Sure those quotations were irrelevant, but we had one objective: to keep him [Sinclair] from becoming Governor. But because he was a good man, we were sorry we had to do it that way.

It's not a smear, if you please, if you point out the record of your opponent.

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

[Criticizing Republican attacks:] The politics of smear and fear are not worthy of this republic.

It’s attack advertising. It’s dirty tricks advertising. It’s dishonest and lowers the level of the political conversation.

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

I think sometimes negative campaigning, like so much, is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't think we'll ever get rid of it.

President Obama has been attacking relentlessly. In 2008 he said that if you're out of fresh ideas you use stale tactics against your opponent - you try and make your opponent unacceptable and that's what he is trying to do.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

I have never run a negative political ad in my life.

I don't believe in mud slinging. I don't think it does any good.