We need to understand that in the end, if we're going to make a positive difference in the future, we can't have election cycles where one side, the middle and the right side, they talk trash.
You don't hear me lambasting, engaging in personal attacks, getting nasty. I don't think that belongs in politics.
You know, if I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough, I would be convinced we're in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we've got to do something about the unemployed.
Donald Trump you're never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency.
Donald Trump has never tried to reach out to all the American people, he never uses the language of unity, he doesn't try to charm or persuade. He just says, thanks to the people who voted for me and the rest of you are losers.
One of the strongest forms of rhetoric in our society is the rhetoric of blame.
You know, anything more negative, anything more disparaging, anything more adversarial than what [Donald Trump] does already. The mystery is how he's gotten as far as he's gotten.
They [Democrats] are the troubadours and the crooners of catastrophe.
Donald Trump talks us down. He makes disparaging comments about America. He calls our military a disaster. Well, it's not, but it might have been if everybody else had failed to pay taxes to support our brave men and women in uniform.
There's a lot of anger on our side. We've been lied about, we have been lied to, we've been mischaracterized, Hillary calling people deplorables and this kind of thing.
The problem is, there was plenty of trash talk during my presidency. A lot.
Mitt Romney saying that Barack Obama gets an F is one of the most ridiculous things that he has said in this race.
The Democrats can engage in the most reprehensible, mean-spirited, vile, vicious verbal attacks known in politics, and they get praised for it.
You kind of get the same adjectives coming back over again and over again describing millennials. I think the national rhetoric around this generation is unfairly negative.
Republicans have said much worse things about me than any Democrat ever has.
I have never believed you make your case stronger by bad-mouthing your opposition.
I don't think the candidate would be directly responsible for things that their supporters say, but when it gets to a certain level, they ought to say, 'Cut it out.'
The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.
Listen to the people who are talking about how to fix what's wrong, not the ones who just work people into a snit over the problems. Listen to the people who have ideas about how to fix things, not the ones who just blame others.
