When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.
My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics.
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.
For my part, I make this pledge to all of you: The politics of division, of pitting east against west, urban versus rural, region against region, and people against people will have no place in my Administration.
I think Barack Obama has brought a new level of ethical standards to Washington. Has he changed some basic hard-knuckle politics? No. You need hard-knuckle politics to succeed.
In the melting pot that is America, inclusive trumps exclusive. Whether it's single women, young adults, or minorities, alienating the rapidly growing voting blocs is not smart politics.
I think culture precedes politics, and I think the attempts to try and legislate people's behavior... isn't going to be productive until the culture decides what they want to achieve.
I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.
Newt Gingrich is one of the brightest people in the Republican Party and he's always been a little unorthodox in his approach to politics, but that's what makes him Newt Gingrich.
I don't see politics as one or two people just making or delivering announcements - it's also about winning public support and the public enthusiasm. You've got to win public support.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Something often neglected in popular accounts of the Wild West is the extent to which its dramas were colored by the politics and personal resentments left by the Civil War.
I got a job with a law firm in Portland after a couple of years with Senator Muskie. But by then, my interest in politics had been sparked, through meeting Senator Muskie, through seeing what he did.
I was raised as a Christian, where all you're taught is to be humble, even if you did something right. Politics is the complete opposite of: you do something a little nice, and you tell everyone.
I became active in politics because I saw the possibility, if we all sat back and did nothing, of a world in which there would no longer be any stages for actors to act on.
The battle in American politics used to be for the middle. Now, it's all about the building and the intensity of support on the far left and far right wings of both parties. And we have forgotten about the people here in the middle.
We in the Middle East like to talk politics, we like to argue. Just look at the three prophets - Moses, Jesus and Mohammad. They are all from this small region which creates problems all the time.
I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.
I think we have a fascinating new and quite dominant input into politics - and it wont go away. From time to time, people articulate a view that we should ban opinion polls, but that's nonsense.
My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical 'we're in this together' sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.
When all is said and done and the e-book is written about politics and the Internet, it is not going to be about the presidential election. It will be about the smaller elections in aggregate that have a huge effect on people's lives.
