Quotes About Candidates

Race to race, the Republicans are putting up candidates that are quite far out of the mainstream in terms of should we have passed the Civil Rights Act or does Social Security need to exist.

People have to take socialism and anyone running on a socialist platform incredibly seriously.

Everybody runs for political office knocking somebody, and very few run on 'This is what I stand for. This is what I believe will solve these problems.'

Perfect is not on the menu. Nobody is going to be your ideal candidate. You can't dream somebody up out of nothing that's going to be the perfect candidate, so you do have to pick between a series of bad choices.

Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine.

Hillary Clinton is a non-starter and lacks the integrity to lead this nation, but Trump has a long way to go to earn the support of many - me included.

We're never gonna have a nice lady run for president.

When I started 'CNN,' I made the decision to stay out of endorsing candidates, and let the doers make up their own minds about politics, that it wasn't going to come from me.

Why aren't you as wealthy as you should be? It may be because of the way you operate your household. Would a business, especially a very productive one, ever hire a key employee without doing a serious background check and an in-depth interview? No! Yet most people, even those with high incomes, hire financial advisors after obtaining little or no background information about these "employment candidates." Some

Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.

The main influence on voters should be a series of robust debates among the candidates. It's a free country, so this is a tough problem to solve, but I'd love to see an election season with zero political ads, and all voters had to decide based on watching four national debates over the two months leading to election day.

Elections are zero-sum games. That means that there's always one winner and a lot of losers. If you just get one more vote than the other person, you win that election.

Most of what is said by candidates on the right is half-baked truths and fabrications coated in 'patriotism or family values.'

If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.

After saying yes to Turkey, the EU is having difficulty finding clear and consistent grounds for saying no to other, still more remote candidates - but being in the general vicinity of Europe does seem to be a continuing requirement.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Early on, even before he was the front-runner, TV news was giving Trump far more attention than other candidates and far more than he deserved.

The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

The conservative version of American exceptionalism has become a password of sorts for candidates who want to prove their credentials to a right-wing America.

Does it make any sense at all that the chair of a national party would want fewer voters to see our candidates?

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.

Nobody wanted Jeb Bush, nobody wants Hillary Clinton.

I honestly don't even really want to think about it [if Donald Trump wins]; I'd rather focus on how wonderful Hillary Clinton is.

Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets—and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.