David Gergen Quotes (32 Quotes)

For a two-term president after the November elections in the middle of your second term, things start going downhill and you really do start quacking like a duck.

Win or lose, he realized that it was going to be very difficult to govern and that the better part of valor was to step aside.

A man never benefits from going to a psychiatrist if the only reason he's there is because of his wife. You have to want to change from within.

Think of that, the split-screen sense. That's the problem this presidency has ... it's being split down the middle.

It's clear they are bringing in someone to do better marketing. Whether they are bringing in someone to bring more complete information to the public is very much an open question.

You can second-guess this all you want ... but there's no question that the four days that elapsed that we had this mini-storm that blew up was embarrassing for the vice president and embarrassing for the president.

I think he still has time to recover politically, and I think it's likely he will. He's good at this. You'll see a better Bush during the next few days, in charge and compassionate. But if he doesn't, there's going to be a serious political price to pay.

I think the president has raised the stakes for himself. He has raised the stakes for his presidency, so that if there are more explosions in the next few months ... his approval ratings will suffer some more.

There's an old saying that you can't open a new circus until the old circus leaves town. It was just inevitable that this is going to continue to hang over their heads because the investigation continues. The Libby-Rove-Cheney story continues to have legs, and it's going to continue to for some time. And the war still goes on.

I think he has to calibrate it very carefully. The White House says it is going to be a very optimistic speech. But I think people are not feeling very optimistic at the moment.

Why a White House that was so adept in most of the first term has misjudged two or three big calls in its second term it's puzzling.

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On 911, we were attacked by an enemy. But there's no foreign enemy here. There's nobody to blame.

There's a normal tendency in the campaign, during a crisis, for the country to rally around the White House. That may help Al Gore in this campaign, but on the other hand, George W. Bush handled himself so well the other night on foreign policy that I think it fortified him just before this crisis broke.

What you're seeing in the East Wing is normal turnover, and what you're seeing in the West Wing is abnormal. It's an aberration to have a team stay as long as this one has.

Yes, it absolutely suggests that. It sounds to me... as if they had a negotiation between the agency and the NSC over what they were going to say, that the CIA objected strenuously to the idea of asserting it on the basis of U.S. intelligence, and when the NSC came back and said, let's blame it on them, let's attribute it to the British, the CIA, well, on that basis, on part of our negotiation, we withdraw our formal objection. And Condi Rice is saying, he didn't object, therefore, we didn't take it out.

I don't think there's any other president in the modern era that has seen this kind of stability.

I don't have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don't think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that's the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.

Incumbents in both parties are dancing perilously close to the edge right now Gas prices are out of control, we are bogged down in Iraq and now politicians seem to be doing more talking than acting. We may be heading toward an election in which the attitude is to throw the bums out, and if that happens, Republicans will pay the bigger prices because they are in control.

You can slice and dice this thing any way you want, but I still think it's politically damaging for the administration.

That would give you protection against Democratic attacks and restore bipartisan spirit.

This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't reveal their sources.

Don't just listen to the lawyers. You know in your heart it's time to get this behind you, avoid the nightmare of more proceedings up on the Hill.

I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it.

Larry is a friend and I believe in the vision of renewal that he set forth for the university. He recognized that it was almost impossible to move things forward.

If Karl Rove were indicted, that would be like George W. Bush losing his right arm at a time when he needs every limb he's got to climb out of the hole he's in and to rebuild his presidency.

I'm told by some people close to him that this will not be a Kerry-bashing speech. But he's not going to simply rally around Bush. Indeed it's going to be the story of an immigrant coming to this country and finding a country that's embraced him and a party that's embraced him.

There has been this legitimate concern that he has been isolated. It is a smart move on his part to do this. Presidents in the past have frequently called in the old guard. He gets the benefit of hearing different views and is seen as getting out the bubble.

Changing the subject will not work. Giving more speeches about Iraq or the state of the economy doesn't have the weight that action does. It's dangerous for the country to have a disabled president for three years, and we're getting close to seeing that happen. I worry that they Bush and his aides are in denial.

If people stay that long, group-think can set in, and that's dangerous for a president.

He (Rove) is the president's right arm, as we all know. And the president's in a deep hole and it's very hard to climb out of a hole without your right arm.

You can agree or disagree with Ronald Reagan's policies, his conservatism. I was less conservative than he was, but if you add it all up, I believe he ranked as the best leader we've had in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt, and that's saying a lot.