Collin C. Peterson Quotes

What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country ... he knows that ... the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he's just a victim. ... This guy clearly understands he's getting all the attention and he understands he's got a political party doing everything it can, plus a local sheriff doing everything that they can to make sure he's not convicted of murder -- but something lesser.

Every political race I've started, I've entered as an underdog and a long shot. This is certainly no exception. But I happen to be the best person for this job. Democrats need someone who can win. And there are two strategies for winning: You can energize the base, which is the strategy the party has used in the last couple of elections...unfortunately without success.Or you can energize and expand the base and bring the campaign to states where we've not had much success particularly in the heartland.

From my perspective, we actually have to have a stronger, bolder economic message that's not just for white working-class voters, but for people who don't go to college who are white, black, Latino, or wherever. We have to communicate that we care about Detroit and Appalachia, and people suffering in both are problems for the country and a problem for the Democratic Party, not just one or just the other.

Even in South Carolina, as badly as we did, and we did very badly, we won the votes of people 29 years of age or younger. The future of the Democratic Party, the future of this country is involving young people in the political process, getting them to stand up for their rights.

Democrats need to become a 50-state party. You can't have a great party on the West Coast and the East Coast. You need to have a party in all 50 states.

I think his [Bernie Sanders] campaign was good for the Democratic Party, good for our country. And I know how passionate he is about the issues he cares about. So we'll have a long list of matters to discuss when we sit down.

We [Democrats] have become a party of assembling all these different groups, the women's caucus and the black caucus and the Hispanic caucus and the lesbian-gay-transgender caucus and so forth, and that doesn't relate to people out in rural America.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann represent an existential threat to the Democratic Party the way that twenty years ago Clarence Thomas as a black man represented to liberals and the Democratic Party.

I'm going to tell you, what's good for al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today.

In coming to Atlantic City, we believed strongly that we were right. In fact, it was just right for us to come to challenge the seating of the regular Democratic Party from Mississippi. But we didn't think when we got there that we would meet people, that actually the other leaders of the Movement would differ with what we felt was right.

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?

The [Democratic] party's become an urban party, and they don't get rural America. They don't get agriculture.

What does it say about our country when people are so desperate for an alternative to our one-party state masquerading as a two-party state that they'll even elect a professional wrestler governor?

Democrats are not a national party. They have lost governorships, state legislatures, mayoralties. They have lost 1,500 seats since elections, 2010, '12, '14, it's been devastating. And it's all Obama.

The key to winning any general election in the USA is to excite your base and then expand your base - get independent voters and voters who haven't been voting for your party to come to your party.

The future of the Democratic Party, the future of this country is involving young people in the political process, getting them to stand up for their rights, dealing with student debt, which I got to tell you is just crushing people all over this country, making public colleges and universities tuition free, those are the ideas we are bringing out, demanding the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. This is what younger people, working class people want. That is the future of the Democratic Party.

I think, first and foremost, showing up, making sure that Democrats focus not just on elections, not just on presidential elections, but we begin the process of rebuilding the infrastructure of the party at the grassroots. We begin going out to all those rural counties and begin having a conversation with rural voters and making sure that we hear their concerns, hear their complaints, and also educate them about what we are doing, making sure that we focus on state legislative races, not just congressional, Senate, governor, and presidential races.

The Democratic Party has awakened. We've not been awake since 9/11, in many ways. We had moments, sporadically, where we woke up. But I think we were so hit by 9/11, as the whole country was, that we didn't get our legs back. It took a while. Now the Democratic Party is back. I've never seen it as united. Sure, we have a ways to go. We have a lot of ground to cover.

Obama destroyed this party, folks, literally has destroyed the Democratic Party while elevating himself to whatever heights, if he's really achieved them, I still don't believe it, but I'll go along with the flow for now.

Democrats in state legislatures are at their lowest level since the 1920s. President Obama has a can't-miss strategy to save the party in 2016. He's leaving.

The only thing I can think to do is if the Democratic Party can do what the Republicans have done, which is go in there and take control of these legislatures and governors' areas.

One of the things the Democratic Party is trying to do is take the word off-year out of our lexicon, because we've tended to be an accordion as a party. We expand in the presidentials; we shrink in between; and we scratch our head and wonder why we lose midterms.

When will we get done with the fool idea that the way to make a party grow is to scare away everybody who has an extra dollar in his pocket? God forbid that the Democratic Party should become a mere gathering of the unsuccessful!

Pundits are saying that President Obama is starting to lose support among his own party. To give you an idea of how bad it's gotten, today Jimmy Carter compared him to Jimmy Carter.

The Democratic Party will live and continue to receive the support of the majority of Americans just so long as it remains a liberal party.