Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Centrist voters typically decide general elections, so hard-left or hard-right platforms don't help.
The chief of staff has to reflect and sometimes complement the strengths of the president he serves.
I understand personally, ... that it is frustrating to lose presidential elections by narrow margins.
The difference today is that, in both parties, the very extreme elements control the nomination process.
Sometimes you move publicly, sometimes privately. Sometimes quietly, sometimes at the top of your voice.
What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.
Romney said that his tax reform proposal is 'very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan.' How I wish it were.
Realistically, I think we are not prepared to go home until we do get more teachers and lower class sizes.
We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
Business leaders should show what our political leaders seem to lack - that is, a common-sense view of the times.
Eventually, somebody is going to be a hero, and somebody's going to be president. Not necessarily the same person.
There are some who want to move us back to the days when we were protectionists and keep all goods off our shores.
Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats and therefore can never be consciously or even unconsciously biased.
You can use all the flowery words in the dictionary, but sooner or later, you have to let people know where you stand.
I think that if we don't get these politicians to come together we face the most predictable economic crisis in history.
It sounds good to say, 'We're going to do this,' on C-SPAN, but try to do that in real life, and it's not going to work.
As a pro-business Democrat, I understand the obligations of publicly traded companies to maximize returns to shareholders.
I know a lot of people that had one cancer that are not alive today. I've had three. So my glass is much more than half full.
The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts.
I was Al Gore's campaign chairman in 2000, when he won a half-million more votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency.
Most people who talk about either entitlement cuts or revenue - when you have to put pen to paper, it is much more difficult.
While a truly national third party wouldn't necessarily be bad, smaller niche parties are ill-suited to our federalist system.
Bob Gates understands the difficulty of going to war. This is a man who spent almost his entire life working for the government.
The American people have the right to know and understand the laws they live under. And they tend to demand answers sooner or later.
If medicine was practiced in 1965 the way it's practiced today, there's no question that prescriptions would have been included in Medicare.
There are people who kind of gravitate towards running politics based on new ideas and issues, and that was what the secret was for Clinton.
Illinois needs a real strategy for job creation that grows the economy over the long term with high-wage jobs that rebuild the middle class.
President Obama came into office in '08 with the belief that - and the public's belief in him - that he was moderate, that he wasn't a big spender.
And I believe in having an administration that has clearly defined goals, objectives and time lines such that it and its people can be held accountable.
I didn't work for Jimmy Carter all those years to go to cocktail parties. I was there as a political adviser, a short-order cook, to work on topical matters.
This is what happens, when, for the first time in modern history, a candidate resorts to lawsuits to try to overturn the outcome of an election for president.
And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we're left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people.
Demography is changing us as we are older societies, we're living longer. How the generations balance each other out, how that affects education and health care.
When the manufacturing decline began in earnest in 2001, the main culprits were the offshoring of jobs to China, with which we have no trade deal, and automation.
If, after the election, you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and a Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit.
Sanders insists the party adopt 'the most progressive platform ever passed' at its Philadelphia convention. Since when does the runner-up get to dictate the platform?
Ultimately I think what people care about, particularly on an issue like Social Security, is not really what's right and what's left but what's right and what's wrong.
What comes into the Oval Office are not the good or easy decisions. The easy decisions are made elsewhere. The things that make it to the Oval are always the hard ones.
Trump is a different politician. He was a different businessman. His campaign was different. What you saw in his campaign is what you're going to see in his presidency.
If anything, the Democrats' salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center.
I think that what we've been able to do is put together both a good group of scholars and analysts and people who aggressively want to make the case to the American public.
I think that people have to have to have a sense of what ideas are one the progressive side, the Democratic side in order ultimately to be effective in the political world.
We can't give the impression to our allies or friends in Asia that because the president is against TPP... that therefore, economically, we're going to pull away from Asia.
Whether McCain actively sought Palin in 2008 or passively yielded to aides' pressure, he set a new standard for GOP candidates who rely on lots of sizzle and little substance.
I believe that President Clinton considered the legal merits of the arguments for the pardon as he understood them, and he rendered his judgment, wise or unwise, on the merits.
Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency despite losing the popular vote, there's a growing cry to rethink, or even abolish, the electoral college. This would be a mistake.
If your doctor tells you you have a rare disease that he or she has never seen, if you've got an incurable cancer, boy, don't accept that. You know, go and get a second opinion.
Who could not be moved by the sight of that poor, demoralized rabble, outwitted, outflanked, outmanoeuvered by the U.S. military? Yet, given time, I think the press will bounce back.
First and foremost, when I think of him - I'm prejudiced; I worked for the guy for six and a half years - when I think of him, I think of him first and foremost as an idea politician.
I believe that white frame house is worthy of more than a nod of nostalgia, because the values President Clinton learned there and in Hope formed the core of his political philosophy.