Bill Clinton Quotes

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

In politics there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight.

For a politician, the long term is between now and the next election.

I've got a really hard election. If you had a really hard election and it was after Labor Day would you go to North Carolina to a bunch of parties and glad-handing or would you stay home and work as hard as you know how to convince Missourians they should rehire you?

In America, politicians do whatever to get re-elected, and a lot of decisions that were being made at that time by Kennedy were certain not to get him re-elected.

The iron need to get reelected will always take priority over a relative abstraction like a budget deficit.

The Republican high command thinks that Henry Wallace will take so many votes away from the Democrats, and so little from the Republicans, that it does not matter what the Republican Party does. Victory will be theirs, they assure themselves. When any political party gets this feeling, it is time for that party to beware.

A politician thinks of the next election; the statesman thinks of the next generation

India’s democracy has dissolved into … a system totally dominated by electoral victories and defeats. The moment you enter office, you begin to think of the next election.

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

Members of Congress are less beasts of accumulating burden than computational machines designed to win re-election. Their sense of their own political interests is acute.

In Washington, politicians worry about their 'base.' About polls. About ideology. About raising money. About re-election. They measure their future in two- or six-year increments.

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.

The people who run campaigns today have more iron control over the campaign than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

And so I am launched again upon the faithless wave of politics.

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.

Elections are about fucking your enemies. Winning is about fucking your friends.

A most wretched custom is our electioneering and scrambling for office. Misserima omnimo est ambitio honorumque contentio.

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.

Practical politics is the politics of the coming election.

Political candidates are always looking to capture the future.

Re-election campaigns of sitting presidents are always about the sitting president.

Timid and interested politicians think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country.

It's been proven with consistency. The only way to win [municipal elections] is to walk. You have to like going out and pressing the flesh and placing yourself at risk.

It seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to cooperate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.