Presidential Effectiveness Quotes

We saw what happened in Jimmy Carter's administration. President Carter was a good man with the best of intentions. But he came to Washington without a good working relationship with Democratic members of Congress, which played a big part in his administration's problems.

A President who has served in the military is better able to serve as Commander in Chief …. I was a better President for having served …

You don't need to know who's playing on the White House tennis court to be a good president.

I think she [Hillary Clinton] would be far superior to President [Barack] Obama, who is basically remote, aloof and not involved with - he doesn't deal with members of Congress.

Barack Obama will go down alongside George W. Bush in that realm as middling presidents because both made too many mistakes to be categorized as an effective, good president.

Power does seep away from the President in his second term.

I don't think the first hundred days measures the success or failure of any President.

Effective Presidents are those who can achieve a balance between purpose and prudence.

Barack Obama was better as a campaigner than as a - as a president sometimes in this same position. It is easier when you have a foil.

Well, it is alarming to have a president [Reagan] who doesn't know what he is doing.

You can say the president's private life takes up so much of his time that he doesn't focus on his job, so therefore he's terrible. But in my imagination, the 23 hours of the day that we don't experience, he's very hard at work. He's quite an effective and successful president - in my narcissistic imagination.

The president Donald Trump has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful. He also recently has not demonstrated that he understands the character of his nation.

The Clinton Administration has turned out to be a boon. I knew that he would be wonderful, I just knew it from the beginning. From Arkansas? Shoot.

Obama's pop-cultural focus may seem demeaning to the office of the presidency. It may be mockable. But it is also tremendously effective.

This is the man (Ronald Reagan) who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency

There's a lot to learn from President Clinton. It kills me as a strong Republican saying it, but he was the most effective president during my lifetime. And when business got out of line, he smacked them.

He was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn't the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with. ...Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader.

There is no clear relationship between a president’s performance and his well-being. For instance, Dwight D. Eisenhower had a series of medical issues while in office, including a heart attack, a bowel obstruction and a stroke. But historians have written approvingly of his presidency and his ability to achieve consensus. In a 2015 ranking of the presidents from a survey of political scientists, he came in seventh. Perhaps one of the sickest presidents in the country’s history was John F. Kennedy, who suffered not only from a failure of the adrenal glands, known as Addison’s disease, but also from debilitating back pain. A physician, Janet Travell, treated Kennedy with narcotics, stimulants and various hormones. Most worrisome, Kennedy retained the services of a shady physician named Max Jacobson, who injected him with amphetamines. Yet while some of Kennedy’s decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, involved poor judgment, Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek found no definitive evidence that the illnesses or medications were the cause. And historians have praised many aspects of Kennedy’s tenure.

I believe in term limits for presidents because I think that there is no doubt I'm a better president now than I was when I start. I would argue that I am the best president I've ever been over the last year or two. My team is more effective than it's ever been.But what is also true is that number one, this is grueling.

Certainly there are worse sins than doing everything possible to make your presidency matter.

Jimmy Carter was unquestionably the most moral president of my lifetime, but he wasn't much of a president.

This is how we honor 53 dead, innocent people who had nothing to do with their deaths. They just were in the wrong place at the wrong time, when a bigot decided to take 'em out. And all of a sudden we're judging the aftermath as to whether or not [Barack] Obama's an effective president? For crying out loud!

It's not implausible that Donald Trump could have been a successful President.

I'm going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you're not going to believe it.

The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president.