Quotes About Candidates

People with conservative temperaments don't become fighter pilots or presidential candidates - they're all that way to some extent.

The 1980 Republican presidential contest might have been as good a roster of candidates as ever fielded by any party.

In presidential elections, I think people focus way too much on ideology.

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism.

The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus is crucial for every presidential campaign.

If you look at where presidents come from, they're former governors or senators.

I don't have more money. I won't have more money than any of the candidates, even the Republican candidates. We know that already. But we are building this campaign team like I would build a business. And that is, we are building it so far with no debt.

My approach to politics is that I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm an American and I always support candidates I think are great for the country.

We just want to make sure the best candidates get the attention they deserve.

That would be the biggest shake-up Washington ever had, if big money didn't dictate who the candidates were and who got elected.

I like candidates who tell me something that is going to make a difference to me.

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

Crossroads is second to none in our support of Tea Party candidates. In 2010 and '12, we spent over $30 million for Senate candidates who were Tea Party candidates. We spent almost $20 million for House candidates who were Tea Party candidates.

Much of what Tea Party candidates claimed about the world and the global economy during the 2010 elections would have earned their adherents a well-deserved F in any freshman economics (or earth science) class.

The Tea Party is almost solely grassroots-based; business interests have almost no grassroots organization. The Republican Party has for too long been run on behalf of business interests who favor candidates the grassroots hate; the minute that those candidates begin to flag, only loyal Tea Partiers stand behind them.

The Tea Party movement started in late 2008 as a rejection of President George W. Bush's bailout of the auto industry and Obama's excessive stimulus spending. It evolved into a movement opposed to ObamaCare, and grassroots efforts were employed to find qualified political candidates who could beat incumbents.

Politics has become very corporate. There's a whole farm system for the teams. There's decisions made at the top. There's a lot of literal corporate involvement, PAC money involved in selecting and backing candidates.

Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.

But the Stalin school of organizational work differed from the Sverdlov in one fundamental aspect that Stalin did not mention: it applied a self-serving test in selecting candidates for advancement in the party hierarchy. No longer did it suffice to give good indication that one was a person of ability, energy, and devotion to the Bolshevik cause.

For my own job, my short list included Hillary, Colin Powell, Panetta, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.

This is one of the prices that the biological tribesman must pay for becoming an artificial super-tribesman. The only solution is to find a brilliant, rational, balanced, deep-thinking brain housed in a glamorous, flamboyant, self-assertive, colourful personality. Contradictory? Yes. Impossible? Perhaps; but there is a glimmer of hope in the fact that the very size of the super-tribe, which causes the problem in the first place, also offers literally millions of potential candidates.

I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

An Amazon recruiting handout warns CamperForce candidates that they should be ready to lift up to fifty pounds at a time, in an environment where the temperature may sometimes exceed 90 degrees.