Personality Politics Quotes

The presidential race should not be a battle of personalities.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

My worry about this exclusive focus on Trump - the personality and how all of this is so unprecedented - is that then the solution seems to be, 'Well, we'll just get rid of Trump.'

Elections in India are not contests between personalities. They are ultimately battles involving political parties; promises and pledges that political parties make; the vision and programmes that political parties bring to the table. So although, Modi's style is 'I, me, myself,' I don't think 2014 elections as a Modi versus Rahul contest.

You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.

Possibly the defining development of postmodern politics - naturally, an American one - is the separation of personality from ideology. If you are likeable, or at least not disagreeable, if you can strike a personal bond with the electorate, if you reassure rather than disrupt, it doesn't really matter what you stand for.

Obama's ability to use his personality to push folks, whether on Capitol Hill or in Europe, means that he has to stay popular. What happens if he loses that popular mandate?

Our political system needs changing. It needs to move away from personalities and patronage to a system of party programs and consultation with the people.

There's a basic law, Klein's second, or third, or fourth law of politics in the TV age, which is warm always beats cold, with the exception of Richard Nixon. The nicer guy usually wins.

I believe that politics is a matter of person. Specifically in the Fifth French Republic. In a healthy political system, a political party should resemble its leader.

It seemed like after the 80s and 90s there came a sort of weird time in politics, where something like Spitting Image was no longer feasible because politicians weren't the big personalities that they once were. But now it seems like we're coming out of that, I mean we've got Boris Johnson, and Trump overseas, and Jeremy Corbyn.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

There's always that tension between policy and personality in politics, and as voters, we have that, too: we all vote on issues, but we also vote on whether we like the people who are put forward.

Television's compelling power is its immediacy . .. this immediacy feeds the politics of emotions, gut reactions and impressions rather than the politics of logic, facts and reason; it emphasizes personality rather than issues.

The lesson of the last year is this: foreign policy can't be managed through the politics of personality, and our President would do well to take note of an observation John F. Kennedy made once he was in office - that all of the world's problems aren't his predecessor's fault.

I just see how Donald Trump treats other people, and I was impressed by that.

Perhaps election fever is developing into something more like sleeping sickness, as the utter boredom of a contest in which almost all the attention seems to be on personalities and polls wears us all down. I just wish they would get on with it.