Gracie Allen Quotes

Pete Wilson was never more than the sum total of his focus groups.

Politicians love to beat up on guys that are seen to be public enemies, if you will. That's a great way to get elected.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.

Because of the spin-meisters and the focus groups and the way politics is run now. It's run by polls and focus groups. So it's even more true today, I think, than it was some 40 years ago.

I watched the way Hillary Clinton talk now about how lovely everything is and how wonderful she is. It doesn't work that way. She was after him, she was trying to - she even sent out or her campaign sent out pictures of him in a certain garb, very famous pictures. I don't think she can deny that.

An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.

The mainstream media may have trouble resisting the temptation to declare that Karl Rove has been demoted, but the truth is quite the contrary. By giving up his role as deputy White House chief of staff, Rove has been freed to do what he does best: shape big issues and develop strategies to win elections.

Republicans are completely befuddled by Obama's 'star power' and don't seem to have a clear or effective strategy to compete.

Attacking lobbyists is a good lobbying technique.

Politics is the business of managing perceptions.

Today being President is really no different than running for President. It’s about approval ratings and photo ops and damage control and deniability.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

On those rare occasions when successful [political] reform organizations have been welded together they have developed techniques of political astuteness, leadership and discipline not unlike political machines.

When you run a campaign the idea is not to appeal to pundits but to appeal to people.

The game of politics is to make you afraid so that you don’t think.

As human nature is very much the same in Congress as in a stock exchange, a church convention, or a newspaper office, the President who deals with Congress tactfully and courteously will, in the long run get more of what he wants than the President who does not do so. He may not get so much credit for what he does gain, from those people who like to see a President fight Congress, especially in that flattering way which consists in appealing to them to make Congress do what the President wants done.

Its [the Bush family’s] sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution

Democratic politics—that is modern mass politics—is a battlefield in which the most important move is that which decides what the battle is about, what the issue is.

Politics is power, and communications is power,

I knew Saleh well, having interviewed and met with him several times. He was a professional Machiavelli, fluent in all forms for political maneuvering.

It seemed to me to be entirely un-kosher, if that's a word, to try to put a debate about war right in front of the midterm to try to affect the midterm outcomes.

In every American election, crazy things are said. Positions are taken which the winners try very hard to forget afterwards.

Let's remember that Bruce Rauner has every interest in getting stories out there that hurt Democrats.

If you look at what these politicians do when they speak, most of the time they are trying to convey a tone... if I make all these points and move my hands this way, I can get re-elected. When in reality, they aren't saying anything.