Normally, the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the appointment of judges of the higher judiciary ensures that citizens come to know of these appointments only after the Presidential notification, announcing the appointments, is issued.
I’ve focused on making sure we have talented teachers and principals in our schools through proposals like the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act and the Presidential Teachers Corps.
When 3 million more people vote for a presidential candidate, but that candidate still loses, the system sucks. Period. It’s broken. I think it’s broken if the candidate loses by one vote and still wins. Losing by 3 million votes, but still winning the election, is preposterous.
It’s sobering to realize that there’s a huge chunk of the U.S. voting population that doesn’t think of sexual assault as something horrendous enough to disqualify a presidential candidate.
I work really long hours and work a lot and have done press tours and junkets, but there is nothing like a presidential campaign that I have experienced before… I think at one point we visited three different cities in one state in 12 hours. It’s exhausting.
I read contrived memoirs by presidential candidates. For every ‘Dreams From My Father’ – Barack Obama’s honest, literary portrayal of his biracial upbringing – there were a dozen cautious, formulaic vanity projects by politicians.
A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.
Iowa has long been heralded as a bulwark against the money and media that dominate the modern presidential race. Its caucus requires voters in every precinct to actually gather in a room, at one time, and listen to neighbors pitch their chosen candidates, before they are allowed to vote.
No one expects the tone of an election to be mild-mannered, least of all a presidential one.
In the summer of 1952, when I was 30, the Army assigned me to an infantry unit fighting in Korea. Meanwhile, though, there was other news in my family: My father had become the Republican presidential nominee. As an ambitious young major, I refused any offers for other assignments.
The closely divided presidential election of 2000 – in which George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by the slimmest of margins in Florida – forever implanted the divide between red states and blue states in our political consciousness.
Everyone knows the presidential candidates and has an opinion about them. But as you get to smaller races, that evaporates and you can win through sheer elbow grease.
Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods.
Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.
Reading a teleprompter is not what makes you presidential. It’s your actions that you take, and it’s democracy.
During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians.
Presidential elections and the voter experience have long been fraught for black people. From racist poll taxes to made-up literacy tests to the egregious rollback of voting rights over the past 50 years, American democracy has, at times, felt like a weird and failed social experiment.
Consider this: The United States held its first presidential election in 1789. It marked the first peaceful transfer of executive power between parties in the fourth presidential election in 1801, and it took another 200 years’ worth of presidential elections before the courts had to settle an election.
I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences: to point out perspectives that are different.
I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.
Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they’re about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation’s desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back.
My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly.
Presidential candidates don’t chew gum.
It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.
We’ve got 50 percent voter turnout for presidential elections. That’s appalling. We can do so much better.
No one can change the definition of what behavior is presidential because that definition fundamentally depends on what our form of government requires, not on what one individual prefers.
The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history – no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed.
Cowboy boots you can’t wear unless you actually are a cowboy or in a Status Quo tribute band, or over 60; there’s something about a retiring gent in cowboy boots that looks sort of presidential.
As someone who’s been covering presidential campaigns since the 1950s, I have no delusions about political reporting. Candidates bargaining access to get the kind of news coverage they want is nothing new.
A presidential candidate needs a slogan.
As a Democrat following the 2012 presidential election closely, I was happy to see that South Carolina voted overwhelmingly for Newt Gingrich, a candidate almost too easy for President Barack Obama to beat in the fall. I was not, however, surprised at the state’s gaffe.
Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.
Guatemala’s ornate presidential palace, once a terrifying fortress whose every corridor was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers in berets and camouflage uniforms, is now a normal public building where ordinary citizens enter without fear.
My legal bond with the A.K.P. may have ended the day I took the presidential oath of office, but my bonds of love have never ended and never will.
Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you’re the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting.
Presidential powers are not exercised by a body or group. The Constitution vests ‘all executive power’ in one and only one person – the president.
Was Sen. Barack Obama a Muslim? Did he ever practice Islam? The presidential candidate officially rejects the claims, but the issue of Obama’s personal faith has re-emerged amid conflicting accounts of his enrollment as a Muslim during elementary school in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
The lesson of the Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal failures is simple: You can’t run a presidential campaign from the undercard stage.
Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right – and the national government should protect it.
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.
When Obama was first proposed as a presidential candidate in 2007, the nation failed to have a meaningful debate concerning the serious constitutional issue of electing someone whose father was not a U.S. citizen.
I am committed to ensure that our 2008 Republican presidential candidates forthrightly address issues of importance to the African-American community.
Bill Clinton’s legacy on job creation should be assailed by none and admired by every presidential candidate who hopes to do the same.
I, as prime minister, never went to Washington. Certainly never went to a presidential ranch. I hate to say this, but I wasn’t going to be the pilot fish to the shark, whereas Australia quite happily bobbed along like a happy little pilot fish with a shark who was a messy eater, and I just couldn’t feel like that.
At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.
Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where ‘presidential’ and ‘actually funny’ overlap.
If the presidential nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo.
