Elections & Campaigning
Page 14
- If we don't do something real soon, I think you'll have to agree that we're going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It's one or the other in 1964. It isn't that time is running out -- time has run out!
- There is a lightning quickness to the speed at which candidates can build and accidentally dismantle their own campaigns. If candidates don't figure out their place in the new digital world of politics, they will be destroyed by it.
- We have too many people worried about the next election and not worried about the next generation.
- If we are negative by nature, we Americans are more human than most. The Founding Fathers loved going negative. Heck, the Declaration of Independence is one long negative ad.
- There’s always a danger in politics of assuming past is prologue.
- The key variable in determining whether a ‘win is a win’ is expectations. If a candidate does well where he is not supposed to do well, that's a win. If he doesn't do well where he's supposed to do well, that's a loss. Meanwhile, delegates are won and lost. That's the rock solid number that will determine the nominee. That is the only number that matters, and yet sometimes it seems it doesn't matter at all.
- Campaign promises are - by long democratic tradition - the least binding form of human commitment.
- If you’re now the front runner, you've gotta expect that everybody’s gonna come at you from a hundred different angles. When they get done, are you still standing?
- In politics, purity is the enemy of victory
- It's very rare I come to an event where I'm like the fifth or sixth most interesting person. Usually, people want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. … That has not been the case at this event.
- People want to cut the childish political posturing. With the problems facing the country, our campaigns have become an embarrassment to democracy.
- The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.