Wesley Morris Quotes

A 30 second negative ad can matter more to a candidate's career than a lifetime voting record.

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

Eisenhower was willing to experiment with television to promote his candidacy, his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson was less inclined to do so. Fearful that the election might become a simple decision between “Ivory soap vs. Palmolive,” Stevenson shunned short, televised commercials and opted instead to talk sense to the American people with more substantive speeches.

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.

Pictures can be devastating. Who allowed John Kerry to get himself photographed windsurfing in a flowered swimsuit? Anyone in the real world in that operation?

The degree to which campaigns have become dominated by marketing is breaking the spirit of democracy, and we're all just so sick of it, across party lines.

Campaigns are not for educating. They're for linking up with the public mood.

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

The trouble [with modern political campaigns] is that the technicians of the media and the professional campaign advisors believe that the negative commercials and the attack work better.

It [television] has locked candidates into ridiculous positions because only ridiculous positions can be compacted into 30-second commercials.

The First Law of Politics: Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.

We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes. There are no accidents in politics.

Politics is television and whoever masters it is likely to win.

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.

Political debates, which are considered central to modern American political campaigns, appear useless as they put pressure on each candidate to put on some sort of act, to show in an impossibly brief time a superior, distinctive personality and command of the issues; the debates therefore are…fake

To win [elections] in this country these days you've got to campaign down to a 13-year-old's level of mental development.

Campaigns are about creating cartoons.

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work - more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you're a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

You certainly don't want to market the president as if he or she were a box of breakfast cereal.

"Perceive" is the word that became in the '72 campaign what "charisma" was for the 1960, '64 and even the '68 campaigns. "Perceive" is the new key word. When you say perceive you imply the difference between what the candidate is and the way the public or the voters see him.

The media cannot come separate [Donald] Trump from his supporters. Only Trump can do that. They're trying, they're gonna keep trying because they think they can. They did it with [George W.]Bush. They did it with [Mitt] Romney. They did it with [John] McCain. They did it with Bob Dole.

In politics, familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It breeds votes.

I'm not against T.V. advertising for campaigns, but we need to emphasize field campaigning much more than we do.

I love covering politics at that early stage where you can walk up to Mike Huckabee, who gets out of his car by himself. A car that he drove, who just walks up and talks to you because that's the only way he can get his message out.