Presidential Campaign Quotes

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

I am a political junkie. During a presidential campaign, I will often buy a couple of newspapers a day just to keep up.

Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign touched on all the themes I have covered throughout my career and all of the layers of meaning that run through black politics. Ambition. Aspiration. Fear. Folly. It was all on display as Obama boarded the roller coaster that ultimately led to the White House.

I had hoped that the current presidential campaign debates might educate the public as to what is really involved in the ongoing controversy over campaign financing.

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump pledged to eliminate our national debt ‘over a period of eight years.’ Now two years into his administration, our national debt has increased, surpassing $21 trillion for the first time in American history.

I perfectly understood President Obama’s attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It’s the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians.

For Jimmy and me, Iowa holds a special place in our hearts. During his presidential campaign I spent over 100 days in Iowa. I visited 105 communities and knocked on more doors and met more Iowans than anyone thought possible.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods.

Having a friend in the Kremlin would help Trump fulfill his longtime dream of planting his name in the Moscow skyline – a dream that he pursued even as he organized his presidential campaign.

Whatever happened during the French presidential campaign will leave no hard feelings. I perfectly understand why Angela Merkel supported Nicolas Sarkozy because of the action they have taken together, even though I have questioned its results, and because of their shared political sensibility.

Let’s not overlook, though, what we do know about the campaign finance scandal, and the fact the Chinese were involved in our presidential campaign and our congressional campaigns.

I understand that people in the media want this to be a sprint every day, but the truth is a presidential campaign is a marathon.

The arguments in the Brexit vote and in the American presidential campaign are about the same. In a friendly way, may I also give some advice to the American people to make the right choice when the moment comes.

I’ve been a news junkie as long as I can remember – and once you’ve covered a presidential campaign, it’s nearly impossible to tear yourself away. There’s so much at stake.

The Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of us all – from ordinary citizens up to candidates for president. If we allow this precious right to be ignored when dealing with a presidential campaign, it can be ignored when dealing with the rest of us.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton’s appointment in 2008 as secretary of state was forced on Obama by her presidential campaign supporters, who insisted she play a major role in the then-new Democratic administration after a bruising primary fight.

The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus is crucial for every presidential campaign.

The legions of reporters who cover politics don’t want to quit the clash and thunder of electoral combat for the dry duty of analyzing the federal budget. As a consequence, we have created the perpetual presidential campaign.

I injured myself politically when I took on Jesse Jackson’ in the 1988 presidential campaign. I was too strident. I didn’t recognize the emotional tie that he had with all black voters.

Bernie Sanders is making a big and potentially dangerous mistake with his continuing insistence on changes to the Democratic Party’s rules and platform. I should know. As chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, I understand too well where such ideological stubbornness can lead.

A traditional presidential campaign has a media bus with the candidate’s name on it and an itinerary days in advance. Trump has a plane with his name on it (that we aren’t invited on) and an itinerary that often mutates daily, along with his talking points.

Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it’s actually most useful to small ones. You can’t win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.

Early on in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Republicans were confronted almost daily with a clear choice: accept Trump’s overt appeals to the bigotry and racism festering in the bowels of the nation, or reject it wholly. Far too many chose the former.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails.

I was very proud to support Obama’s presidential campaign, from the primaries all the way to his historic victory.

I think social issues are always part of a presidential campaign.

As a former presidential campaign manager, I remember the final week of the campaign as being the longest and most important week of the campaign. The week doesn’t seem to end.

Truly, if you can’t cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you should not be covering a presidential campaign.

It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one’s own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as ‘the other side.’

I will not be collateral damage in a presidential campaign, nor will I be a woman bullied by Hillary Clinton.

I work really long hours and work a lot and have done press tours and junkets, but there is nothing like a presidential campaign that I have experienced before… I think at one point we visited three different cities in one state in 12 hours. It’s exhausting.

I’ve often reflected on this in the past weeks as I’ve been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was ‘light-skinned’ and lacked a ‘Negro dialect.’

The lesson of the Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal failures is simple: You can’t run a presidential campaign from the undercard stage.

In a presidential campaign, you can’t lie. You can’t hide what you are and what you want. You can’t hide what kind of President you’ll be. You can’t keep on talking about nothing indefinitely and committing to nothing, you can’t keep running away from debate, masking the challenges.

President Obama is a big supporter of keeping the Internet open. During his presidential campaign, he pledged his support to net neutrality repeatedly.

The Occupy movement flared and then seemed to fizzle out – until it re-emerged in the form of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and in the far-left surge that made Jeremy Corbyn leader of the British Labour Party.

When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it’s pretty easy to think, ‘OK, we can build something pretty big.’