Quotes About Presidency

The biggest disappointment was that I wasn't able to communicate properly to the American people -- with the proper conviction and the proper ability -- where the country really stood. The pessimists, the naysayers, the change-wanters overwhelmed me, and I wasn't good enough. I wasn't articulate enough to have the country understand that we weren't in a recession, that we were in a rather booming economy in the last half of my Presidency. That was a personal shortcoming, a failure on my path.

The nature of the presidency is that sometimes you don't choose which challenges come to your desk. You do decide how to respond.

I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.

Lincoln's time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.

Any man who has been placed in the White House cannot feel that it is the result of his own exertions or his own merit. Some power outside and beyond him becomes manifest through him. As he contemplates the workings of his office, he comes to realize with an increasing sense of humility that he is but an instrument in the hands of God.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

election of the President (CRP) ALEXANDER P. BUTTERFIELD Deputy Assistant to the President; aide to H. R. Haldeman JOHN J. CAULFIELD Staff aide to John Ehrlichman DWIGHT L. CHAPIN Deputy Assistant to the President; appointments secretary KENNETH W. CLAWSON Deputy Director of

Americans expect the president to right the wrongs that plague us—and we blame him when he fails. Because we invest impossible expectations in the presidency, the presidency has become an impossible job. And once the honeymoon period inevitably fades, the modern president becomes a lightning rod for discontent, often catching blame for phenomena beyond the control of any one person, however powerful

Can any American child grow up to be president? Probably not, however fond we might be of the idea. Perhaps a better question is: what well-adjusted tyke would want the job?

There was a revealing moment in the first presidential debate in September 2008, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates, ''Are you willing to acknowledge, both of this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the States?''Neither McCain nor Obama objected to Lehrer's phrasing. Both, it seemed, perfectly comfortable with the idea that it's the president's job to ''rule the country.

Americans' unconfined conception of presidential responsibility is the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties.

The republican form of government rests on representation: The people do not decide issues, they decide who will decide. Who, that is, will conduct the deliberations that "refine and enlarge" public opinion (Madison, Federalist No. 10). This system of filtration is vitiated by a plebiscitary presidency, the occupant of which claims a direct, unmediated, almost mystical connection with "the people.

Presidents may run for office on ideological platforms and promised policies, but their presidency is actually defined by the encounter between fortune and virtue, between the improbable and the unexpected—the thing that neither their ideology nor their proposals prepared them for—and their response. The president's job is to anticipate what will happen, minimize the unpredictability, then respond to the unexpected with cunning and power.

Allende was the first Marxist to win the presidency of a country through a democratic vote. The eyes of the world turned toward Chile.

The CIA orchestrated a plan to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency. First it tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende and to call for a second vote

Clinton had absolutely zero honeymoon, none whatsoever.

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?

You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned 70, or given up all hope of the Presidency.

I do not choose to run for President in 1928.

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else - fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism - then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors.

All fraudulent elections should be condemned, including those in Turkey and Russia. And we need to be doubly mindful not to indulge amateur socialists in this country, because even though a Bernie Sanders presidency is a joke, the consequences of diet communism are deadly serious.

Bill Clinton is a person who causes a lot of passion both ways about people, and there's certainly a lot of turmoil if you look back at the eight years. But there was a lot of good, too.

I still believe the Lewinsky investigation was way off from the focus of what Whitewater was, which turned out to be nothing at the end of the process. And I think that there were people who were determined as political opponents to not allow his presidency to succeed.

The necessary transformation of which I speak and of which my presidency will be a part is built on turning creative possibilities into live realities for all our people.