Campaign Dynamics Quotes

There has never been a campaign where there hasn't been sniping from the outside and second-guessing. I hear the same sometimes from the Democratic side in terms of President Obama's campaign, so that's to be expected.

I did not want to be a source of diversion from the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. It appears no matter what I did or tried to do, that would not be the case. I came to the conclusion that it was in the best interest of all to stand aside.

Probably about 35 percent of Donald Trump's supporters do not believe that President [Barack] Obama is Muslim or that he was not born in the United States.Those Trump supporters are not white supremacists. But if Trump did not have the support of Obama haters who believe that the President is a Muslim, who believe that he was not born in the United States, Donald Trump would lose two-thirds of his support.

It's been an unusual election [2016].

I think that [Donald Trump] clearly was able to tap into a lot of grievances. And he has a talent for making a connection with his supporters that overrode some of the traditional benchmarks of how you'd run a campaign or conduct yourself as a presidential candidate. What will be interesting to see is how that plays out during the course of his presidency.

Anytime you have a reelection campaign against an incumbent president and you're the party out of power - on the one hand it's wide open because there's not an heir apparent - but people are also gauging how strong is that incumbent president and what are my chances.

You can learn a lot about Pat Buchanan by talking to his campaign staff, particularly the ones who have quit or been fired.

If Ross Perot runs, that's good for us. If he doesn't run, it's good for us.

Herman Cain has moved ahead of Mitt Romney. Can you believe that? Political analysts say this is because Americans don't understand Mormonism but they do understand pizza.

Bill Clinton, who packs his own star power, has been a big draw as well as a big drag on his wife's campaign.

How, then, has Obama been saddled with an image of being long on inspiration and short on details? The answer is that journalists are not accustomed to covering a candidate who moves crowds the way Obama does, who uses speech cadences and rhythm like Martin Luther King Jr. without making his talk explicitly about race. Sen. Clinton already owned the policy-wonk slot, so by default, Obama was cast as the poetic one.

There's a normal tendency in the campaign, during a crisis, for the country to rally around the White House. vThat may help Al Gore in this campaign, but on the other hand, George W. Bush handled himself so well the other night on foreign policy that I think it fortified him just before this crisis broke.

McGovern couldn't carry the South if Rhett Butler were his running mate.

The Sarah Palin choice both its timing and the fact that it was her, it was really an audacious strategic move by the McCain campaign to try to change the trajectory of the 2008 presidential race and the initial launch was very successful. She didn't withstand the scrutiny very well though and the close questioning.

Michael Rubio said Trump's plan was impulsive and not well thought out. The other thing that's really annoying Republicans is that this was supposed to be their great week. The president gave a speech on terrorism that was not well received. They were working hard to tie Hillary Clinton to the president. Then along comes Donald Trump, and the story changes dramatically.

Senator Graham would have been very difficult to beat. He'd been governor for two terms. He's a U.S. Senator. He has a lot of friends; he's done a lot of favors to help a lot of people in Florida. So the fact that he's not running really does change the whole landscape in Florida.

Bill Bradley is a serious politician and if Al Gore stumbles seriously, then Bradley is there to take advantage of that.

During the 2008 election, I made clear to the Obama campaign that I don't think it's wise for me to force my personal political agenda on anyone.

I think the American people want to see the interactivity between candidates and audiences, and tough questions posed by people and how you handle them under fire.

Who knows if John McCain could have won that presidential campaign [2008] in any circumstances when George W. Bush the outgoing Republican president had a 22 percent approval rating.

The fact is that, once you are the person - and Ms.[Hillary] Clinton is the person who injected this type of commentary [bigot] into this race [2016] - once you inject that type of commentary into this race, you can't then sit back and start complaining about it or have some of your handmaidens in the media complain about it.

During last night's debate, John Kerry and John Edwards were so friendly to each other some political experts think that they may end up running together. In fact Kerry and Edwards were so friendly, President Bush accused them of planning a gay marriage.

There can be an energy in a populist campaign that isn't always in the best interest of the party.

The amazing thing about Trump is that he is so completely predictable. Hillary Clinton knows that if she teases him about either his wealth, his taxes, the women who are coming after him or his preposterous claims of being against the Iraq war, he cannot resist.

I think the country is very settled in a lot of ways, and we saw that after the Democratic Convention. I think a lot of the bump that we enjoyed came when John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate.