Governing Style Quotes

A chief of staff has to reflect the president's governing style.

The man [President Ronald Reagan] will be out campaigning three days a week. The rest of the time he will govern.

In fact, I think that Governor Clinton, when he was running, and President Clinton, when he was serving, actually governed with a wide range of advisors and a perspective that blended the best of ideas from the center and the left.

Like king, like law; like law, like people.

My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives.

He told people he’d run Arizona like a business. Every Arizonan has been praying that he didn’t mean his business.

Zedillo's lack of political savvy is a personal flaw. But his insulated and elitist governing style reflect the age-old vices of the political system itself.

The conservative Republican governors tend to be more oriented toward trying to work with Democrats and getting things done.

Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. That's not how we were meant to govern.

If you look at how I've tried to and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I'm a pretty practical guy and I just want to make sure that things work.

Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way- to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it's merely their guess.

I learned everything I ever need to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget.

The Limbaugh Theorem is the way Obama gets away with no accountability for anything he's done is he never was perceived as governing. He was always as an outsider campaigning all the time against powerful forces trying to stop whatever it was he wanted to do.

We have done almost everything in pairs since Noah, except govern. And the world has suffered for it.

Obama ran as sane and decent, as though we were electing a mood, and not necessarily a set of policies. Unfortunately, Obama has governed the same way - and misread the mood, which is all there is, really, because being crazy and stupid is all we're really good at politically any more.

Even CEOs police their own bureaucracy. Trump is not that. He does have more in common with these guys than most elected officials would have, particularly in the Obama administration. Obama didn't have anybody that'd ever worked in the private sector. All they had is a bunch of theoreticians who thought they were smarter than everybody that runs businesses in the private sector. And who knows what kind of pressure was brought to bear. Remember, Obama's agenda was one that was to be governed against the will of the people.

If you look at the themes that he struck from the minute he started running for president through today, there is a very high level of consistency, and there is a sense that he is who he is. Obama's governing is completely consistent with the way he campaigned and the themes on which he campaigned, the issues he highlighted, the vision he shared.

Had I been a dictator, I would still be governing.