Political Convention Quotes

I joked at our National Convention that our party was nominating a candidate for president who was charismatic, larger than life, memorable, so they wanted to balance the ticket.

Mr. Mayor. I've decided the best place for the '68 [Democratic] convention is Chicago! You are the one who can handle it!

The election of the President and the Vice-President of the United States has passed,—not only from the college of electors to which the constitution confided it, and from the people to which the practice under the constitution gave it, and from the House of Representatives which the constitution provided as ultimate arbiter,—but has gone to an anomalous, irresponsible body [the convention], unknown to law or constitution, unknown to the early ages of our government.

The convention will be dead-locked, and after the other candidates have gone their limit, some twelve or fifteen men, worn-out and bleary-eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down about two in the morning around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination. When that time comes [Warren Gamaliel] Harding will be selected.

This weekend the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, featured several speakers including Sarah Palin and Phil Robertson from 'Duck Dynasty.' It was a good weekend for conservatives - and a great weekend for wild animals.

The President? Hmmm, I wonder who that might be? Could it be, perhaps, the sitting two-term incumbent of the same party holding its convention? The person whose economic and military policies shape the environment the next president will deal with? As best I can tell, in the tens of thousands of words making up the combined remarks of John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Lindsay Graham, the Name That Must Not Be Uttered appeared exactly once.

2004 was a great year for Boston! The Patriots won the Super Bowl! Boston hosted its first national political convention! And - the Red Sox won the World Series!

As the Democrats get revved up at their convention in Boston, President Bush is fighting back the only way he knows how: by going on vacation! Ah, it's nice to take a rest, replenish your supply of smirks. The vacation was expected, because Bush traditionally takes a month off every summer to relax and avoid reading National Security Warnings.

No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.

The American people get to express themselves, and in the ways that they choose. But I have got to tell you, I - this convention, I have sensed a tremendous amount of energy, a tremendous amount of unity, not around the personalities, but around the choice that we face in the fall.

It really kind of looks like now that John Kerry is on his way to the presidential nomination. The only thing that can sink John Kerry now is an Al Gore endorsement.

Referring to the 1960 Republican convention where the national ticket was determined well in advance:] The party itself was hyping the conflict to create interest in what otherwise might have been a very dull convention.

I was at the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City. I was running 'Nobody for President' at the time. I printed up these press releases and handed them out to the crowd at the Kemper Arena. 'Nobody keeps campaign promises.' 'Nobody lowers your taxes.' 'Nobody should have that much power.' 'Nobody is in Washington working for you.'

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known - Nominee Barry Goldwater.

This is nothing negative about the other candidates. It's just a recognition of the fact that Governor Romney has won more delegates. He's the only person that really has a chance to take the winning number of delegates into the convention.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

A national campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism [the convention] and a couple of hangings thrown in. It is better, even, than war.

The difference between a GOP convention and Comic-Con is that the people at Comic-Con have a much firmer grasp of reality.

The convention is the voice, the bone and the sinews of a political party-and sometimes it even nominates an Abraham Lincoln.

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.

There comes a time in every political convention where I eat my words.

Did you see the 2000 Republican Presidential Convention? The last time the Republicans had that many Black people on a stage, they were selling them!

Look, this CPAC convention is increasingly the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement. All that’s missing from that convention is a couple of Wookies.

I went to my first national convention in 1976, when my family supported [Ronald] Reagan over [Gerald] Ford, so we've always been Republicans, but we've always wanted the Republican Party to be the party of fiscally conservative, limited-government types. And I think, sometimes, we haven't done that as well.

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.