N. Bhaskara Rao Quotes

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.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

Television has supplanted people as the only audience that campaigners are interested in.

It used to be that you could have fun with interviews with the foreign press, knowing that nothing you said would make it back to any voters until long after the election was over, if ever.

Sometimes, political campaigns make decent people act and talk like perfect buffoons.

I was your C student. I paid attention in the classes that were about how to get elected.

Voters never grow weary of illusory promises.

Every member of Congress is shaped by his or her first election.

Americans no longer gather in the streets to hear candidates; television is the new focal point of politics.

Democracy in the United States takes politicians who are reasonable in private and it churns them through a public process that is almost tailor-made to undermine their virtues. Perpetually kissing up to the voters destroys the leadership qualities the voters are looking for in the first place: tranquility of spirit, independence of mind and a sensitivity to the contours and complexity of reality.

Politics is power, and communications is power,

Politics isn't my cup of tea. I can't lie all the time, beg for votes or put down other politicians.

Presidential elections always turn on personalities, they turn on how campaigns are run, they turn on natural desires for change.

We talked about various aspects of what we wanted to talk about, Hillary [Clinton] and [Donald] Trump and down-ballot stuff, various issues. One of the things that it showed was you've got to use fear.

It seems that elections today are more popularity than they are substantial issues.

I loved campaigning.

Politicians read the polls that show 85 or 90 percent of the voters profess a belief in God, so they identify themselves with religion, often only to the degree necessary to reach the constituency they are targeting.

Any time you have a competitive situation like politics is, there are winners, and there are people who don't win, and their supporters can sometimes be very emotional.

I not only urge you to vote that ticket yourself, but I beg that you will persuade others to do so. Personal effort can accomplish a great deal, and I beg that you will use your personal influence with your friends to get them to go with you to save the boys.

Governing is one thing, campaigning is another - and the latter becomes far more pronounced in an election-year State of the Union.

In terms of the ability to go out and win - this is why you have campaigns. You go out, and you take your issues to voters, and you put them out there, and people respond, or they don't.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

It's very clear you have to engage the public and say: You have to vote no on 74, no on 75, no on 76, no on 77. Those are the issues that Arnold pushing. And those are reactionary, Republican initiatives.

I'm into politics - I'm interested in the election and how pissed off people get.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.