Presidential Elections Quotes

I've covered a lot of presidential campaigns.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

Spending limits have proven a monumental failure at limiting campaign spending in presidential elections, merely diverting the money underground.

The tactics and strategy of every Presidential election campaign is most influenced by the previous Presidential election.

In 1980, evangelicals overwhelmingly elected a candidate who was a known womanizer when he was in Hollywood. He would be the first divorced president in U.S. history. His name was Ronald Reagan. And when evangelicals voted for Reagan, they weren't endorsing womanizing. They weren't endorsing divorce. They were endorsing Reagan's policies.

The way to help this country is to limit Republican power.

Corrupt Bargain

We've got 50 percent voter turnout for presidential elections. That's appalling. We can do so much better.

If not checked the power of money will soon control the elections of the President, the senators and the members of the House of representatives.

In the past, in order to continue as a candidate, a serious candidate, you had to be in the top three finishes in Iowa. You had to be in the top two out of New Hampshire. All our presidents elected in the past half-century finished either first or second in New Hampshire and in the top three in Iowa. That changed with the Citizens United, when we gave unlimited amounts of money.

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

The principle issue in this election is whether or not you are prepared to do anything new.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

Howard Dean was endorsed by former Vice President Al Gore and now he is getting advice from Al Gore. And I'm thinking, who better to give advice than the guy who couldn't even get elected with the most votes?

Presidential elections always turn on personalities, they turn on how campaigns are run, they turn on natural desires for change.

Despite its flaws, the American electoral system has produced Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman.

John Kerry was the big winner in Iowa. Ted Kennedy introduced Kerry as the 'comeback kid.' That used to be Bill Clinton's name - because every time he would come back to a city, he would find out if he had a kid or not.

Presidential politics is not like a golf tournament. There’s no prize for second place.

Education has not traditionally been a large concern in presidential elections, presumably because the president does not run schools.

I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president again.

I think the whole dynamic is different. Whereas in [Barack] Obama's case, even though there was no incumbent, he was able to run against eight years of Bush-Cheney and a Republican Congress, and everyone was tired of everything. He was able to benefit from that.

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump.

In presidential elections, I think people focus way too much on ideology.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

What we are seeing here is democracy in action.