Political Positioning Quotes

I'm not a policy wonk - I'm somewhere between being undecided and a surrogate.

Sarah Palin has managed to use her failed vice presidential run to put herself in a position of power and influence. Joe Biden won the race and he hasn't been able to put himself in a position of power and influence.

President Bush said John Kerry is on both sides of every issue. And Kerry replied, 'No, I'm not ... but there is some truth to that.'

If you're going to get into the political business, you've got to be intensively competitive.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has been positioning himself to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Hillary once developed a program to deliver rural healthcare, while de Blasio once dropped a groundhog on its head.

I think that person who actually proposes things, who will save Medicare, will be in a lot stronger position than someone who demagogues the issue.

Obama has placed himself in perfect political position: he spent the 2008 campaign convincing the American people that he's a racial unifier rather than a divider, without any evidence to prove it.

In opposition, you move to the centre. In government, you move the centre.

I've seen all this tussling about what is [Donald] Trump ideologically and Jim Carney said he's a liberal and people saying, look, he's winning moderates. Chris Christie is an example of this.

Jesse Helms wants me to move to the right, Lowell Weiker wants me to move to the left, and Teddy Kennedy wants me to move back to California.

What the establishment was trying to do was to position me as a Republican running in the Democratic primary.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

It's interesting that at a time when she could have differentiated herself from the ranks of [Democratic National Committee Chairman] Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the far left ranks of the Democratic Party, she chose to join those on the front ranks of the blame game, It would have been interesting if she had shown some level of restraint.

People like Ted Cruz, who has tried to position himself as the best second choice for [Donald] Trump supporters, wouldn't condemn him.

[In politics] You're either moving the ball on them or they're moving the ball on you. It's important to move the ball on them.

I don't want a headline saying 'Kennedy suggests this or implies that.'

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Conservatives won't want to hear this, but the Republican who maneuvered his way into the most impressive victory of the election was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, he's sui generis. But he won a landslide victory after moving to the center, while holding onto conservatives by not hiking taxes.

Somebody is going to have to do fancy footwork to make sure Elizabeth and John Edwards get their prime-time shot .

The Republican convention opens in New York to re-nominate George W. Bush and showcase the party's, quote, 'moderate side.' Will voters buy it?

As long as there is no trust and confidence that there will be justice and fairness in resource distribution, political positioning will remain more important than service

We are more often than not asked, for instance, to regard Israel and Palestine as in a conflict of this kind, a framing that sets each of them on equal footing, and implicitly analogies the political situation to a fist fight, a soccer match, or a domestic quarrel. So if, then, the only two intelligible political positions are "pro-Palestinian" or "pro-Israeli," the presumption is that one's position is determined by a sentiment that wants one side to win over the other.

We're not paying attention to the fact that Hillary Clinton is running in 2006. Everyone is looking to her for the future. It's the same with anybody else who's positioning themselves.

I'm not a populist. But I try to present complicated issues in such a way that people know where I stand.

When we classify an issue as a 'shield issue' it is usually because we feel that someone else occupies the high ground on that issue. We feel we can't win on that issue and so we adopt a defensive posture.