James Carville Quotes

Our adversaries - our Democratic adversaries - like to be able to portray the Republican Party as a bunch of wingnuts - narrow based, always have some agenda that's not attractive to the public... That's easier for them, and more fun, than dealing with their own problems. And I think their problems are significant.

After President Obama's election, efforts at othering Obama quickly became about smearing his non-partisan allies and ambassadors.

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.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

Negative politics have always been around.

Neither political party is clean when it comes to tactics that divide our people.

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.

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 wasn’t elected to get into back room deals with Jesse Helms. I’ve despised Jesse Helms since I was 18 years old.

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

Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, was a bad guy.

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

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country-and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

The tone of a portion of the press of the country toward public men, and especially toward political opponents, is degrading, all forms of coarse and noisy slander being apparently considered legitimate weapons to employ against men of the opposite party or faction.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

If Romney would go ideological in explaining Obama, it would help. We gotta stop the, 'He's a nice guy' stuff. Nice guys don't do what Obama is doing. Nice guys don't say and do and act the way Obama is saying, doing, and acting.

There are smart people on our side of the aisle who have known as early as I did who Obama was and should have been saying 'I hope this guy fails' right along with me. There should have been opposition to this guy all along.

The Democrats' obsession with the Kochs as a political target is, indeed, additional evidence of a truly Nixonian approach to politics.

One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

The truth is liberals are using every tactic possible to drown the Trump presidency.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

If you're going to run for president as the anti-Clinton, you should know that Democrats and their media friends will do whatever it takes to make you look Clintonian... The questions won't go away because Democrats are desperate to define Republican deviancy down to Clinton levels. The ugliness is just getting started.

The Democrats do not have their key agenda items do not have massive public support, and their attempts to destroy Donald Trump have failed. All of them. So all they can do now - the only thing they've got - is to split Trump's base away from Trump and that's what all of this today is.

Democrats don't have reasons for people to vote for them. They're just trying to gin up anger and resentment for their opposition. And it's just not working anymore.