Paul Ryan Quotes

There is no evidence that super PACs have led to a greater percentage of negative ads.

I said during the course of the campaign I didn't like it and I don't like the idea of having an opponent's picture on your ads and it would be nice to see candidates sign a pledge like that.

I've never, in my whole 30 years in office, run a negative ad.

Mr. Gingrich's injunction represents the worst of American political discourse, which reached a low during the dispiriting presidential campaign of 1988. Then, more than ever before, negative argument displaced reasoned discussion about how a nation might best be governed. The sound bite reigned. Attack commercials flourished. The signs this year aren't any better. Evidence that negative campaigning can come back to sink the sender has had little impact. The races for governor in California and Texas have already seen the same slash and burn. No doubt the proceedings will grow more rabid still as November nears. Negative discourse serves democracy poorly. The temptation to avoid serious debate is already great. It increases as the stakes soar and slander becomes a rewarding, easy option. The issues of the day go untended. The whole affair takes on the character of the gladiator's art. The GOPAC glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence—the Republican whip in the House—and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document. The nakedness of the GOPAC offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear; the bald appeal to invective will certainly probe those limits. For now, it should be said that some adjectives in the glossary aptly describe the glossary itself: shallow, sensationalist, and, yes, shame(ful).

I've been involved in five presidential campaigns, once as national campaign manager for Walter Mondale.

I've got these high negatives because the Koch brothers have spent a year attacking me.

The infamous political ads like Carly Fiorina's 'Demon Sheep' and Christine O'Donnell's 'I Am Not a Witch' are so confusing, it's almost like they were paid for by Democrats.

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

Karen Handel has run a 100 percent negative campaign.

Obama ran a hard-edged and negative campaign against Romney, hoping to convince recession-weary voters that his rival was unworthy of the job.

I don't think people in Hawaii like negative ads, whether it's done by an independent group or whether it's done by the campaign itself.

I hate negative ads in general.

But it was very hard for people to separate me out from Hillary Clinton. All their ads were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and me. They said I was more liberal than these guys, and that if I went to Washington I'd be supporting their agenda. I found that extremely difficult to overcome.

To distract from the president's disappointing record, Team Obama has decided to base their entire campaign on attacking the private sector and Mitt Romney's career as a successful businessman.

Somehow politicians have become convinced that negative campaigning pays off in elections.

They ended up spending a total, their campaign plus the independent, about 1.3 million. I only ended up spending about - not only, but I spent about 2 million. But I had no intention of doing that until I was attacked with a negative ad by an independent group.

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

In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn't have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out.

Candidates who went into an election with negatives higher than 30 or 40 points just inevitably lost.... Drive up the opposition's negatives.

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.

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

Anybody who says negative commercials are wrong and shouldn't be used doesn't know anything about politics. The fact is people respond to those commercials.

A [Presidential] candidate, confident of winning or sure of losing a bare majority of a state’s popular vote has no reason to expend resources there.

The tactics and strategy of every Presidential election campaign is most influenced by the previous Presidential election.

New developments in negative advertising like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth allow a campaign to hurl invective while shielding the candidate from any association with such strategies.