Paul Begala Quotes (60 Quotes)


    Nobody's going to confuse Dick Cheney with a warm and fuzzy guy. You're not going to send him to be comforter-in-chief. He's the type of guy who would look at them and growl, 'Life's tough. Get back to work.' Plus he's busy ruining Iraq.

    Defining the terms of the debate generally dictates who's gonna' win it.


    See, I think if it just became who's sleeping with whom, then there's no reason to prefer one party over the other, 'cause the truth is we're all sinners.

    We won't put the nuclear storage facility in your state unless the science gets better, improves it.


    If you're running for president and you vote for this guy, you're going to come to regret it. Decisions will come down from the court that will outrage very important Democratic voters.

    It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things.

    It's very good for him, ... I wouldn't go so far as to say it locks anything up, though, because people want to make up their own minds.

    I was looking in The New York Times the other day and there was a poll that showed that 31 percent of the people believed that the Democrats had a plan for the country. That's not enough,

    I used to go in at 5:30 or 6:00 so I could run.

    I'm no great fan of how Judge Starr conducted his investigation, but I didn't think that was the time or the place to lodge those complaints.

    It is a painful reminder that even the most well-intentioned among us sometimes act in ways that put children in danger of being abused or neglected.


    I'm very sunny. You know, I'm always optimistic.

    You never have a good night's sleep. You never have a peaceful meal. There's this gnawing in your gut. You get peace when you work.

    Bob Woodward's characterization of my memo is incorrect. In the days following 911 our country came together in a nonpartisan support of the president. During that time, I wrote a personal note to a White House staff member as a concerned American expressing my outrage about the attacks on our country. I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job.

    It's important that the whole international community come together, speak candidly about it, forget about taboos, forget about conservative ideas with respect to what you should tell young people about. It's the lives of young people that are put at risk by unsafe sex. And, therefore, protect yourself.

    Texas is the nearest thing to heaven there is. We love our state but we are embarrassed by our weak government. We ignore 400,000 souls in Third World conditions with no electricity and no running water. We pay our teachers less than our football coaches, and we get the results you'd expect.

    If George W. Bush is given a second term, and retains a Republican Congress and a compliant federal judiciary, he and his allies are likely to embark on a campaign of political retribution the likes of which we haven't seen since Richard Nixon.

    I don't like being a voyeur, looking into other people's marriages.

    Most politicians, when they meet with a guy like me, or a guy like Carville, tell you about how they can win.

    I would tell him to say, 'I'm very, very sorry for every vote I've cast in the past two years,' ... 'I'm sorry that I helped confirm Attorney General John Ashcroft, I'm sorry that I helped explode the federal deficit, I'm sorry that I helped George Bush m

    I mean, for all of his faults and the troubles in his marriage, Bill Clinton is still married to a girl he met in the library 25 years ago at school. Can we say that about many of our other leaders today in America, including on the right wing?

    Bill and Hillary Clinton are the most investigated couple in American history - now the most thoroughly exonerated couple in American history.

    I thought it was terrific, because it showed strength, ... Never again will the Republicans say the Democrats are wimps.

    I didn't spend a lot of time on national security the American people will be glad to know.

    There's the great line: the definition of a liberal is someone who's afraid to take their own side in a fight. And that's my problem with my fellow liberals.

    Again and again, I've seen Bush turn a blind eye as his henchmen have leveled zealous attacks against his political enemies - assaults which the president himself has sometimes directly encouraged.

    If you vote against him in a swing state, you look unreasonable.

    It seems to me the American people never really forgave the Democrats for being right about Vietnam.

    This gets back to the fundamental lesson of political survival that Bill Clinton taught me, which is if you make it about the American people's lives instead of your life, you're going to be okay.

    to live and to kill and to kill and to kill.

    But I think what happened was that Clinton knew how to fight back. And the way he fought back was on the issues - being tough in staying on the things that mattered to people in their lives.

    They're burning the midnight oil to go through every detail. I don't think any of those details can jeopardize this. It's a good agreement for the country.

    One of the problems we saw in the last presidential election in our party is that our nominee, while winning the election, which we ought never to forget, often lost sight of the difference between strategy and tactics.

    In our system, grand juries take every charge, every lie, and they try to sort the truth from the lies, and then they move forward into the system. And that's how the system ought to work. We should respect the secrecy of the grand jury so they can sort through what's true and what's not. And someone is leaking, and if they are leaking from the grand jury investigation, then that's a violation of the law.

    the co-president of the United States, and Americans cannot deny his influence.

    ABC's Ted Koppel said the possibility of a Rove or Libby indictment had risen to the level of expectation, ... If, in fact, the news reports are true, Karl could be in a lot of trouble.

    I think too many Democrats are too wimpy. But I think they're beginning to toughen up.

    The president's bottom line again, election year or not, is youth smoking, saving kids lives.

    Watts joined Crossfire ... What Color is a Conservative

    If it was about lying under oath - we actually know that Clinton certainly was deceptive, as most people would be about their sex lives - but, in fact, he did not lie.

    Back in the 70s I knew people who could recall when Sugar Land was a company town - the company being the Imperial Sugar Company.

    It must kill George Bush that John McCain is the most popular and Beloved Republican in America.

    When all you had to do was punch a hole in the ground and strike oil, it was easy to have the highest high school dropout rate. But you can't drop out and invent a new microchip. Texas is changing, but the constant is hatred of government, and that's a mistake in the 21st century.

    My view was that the campaign had been a sacred thing, that it had been a real compact, because I was there and I saw the connection that Clinton made with people, and the connection that they made with him.

    I was the guy that told Bill Clinton he was going to win. I had gotten the final polling numbers. He had a comfortable lead. He was not going to lose.

    We knew he was in the oil business we didn't know it was snake oil.

    the Brady Bill (for screening of gun purchasers) and the assault weapons ban inflamed the Republican base voters and increased their turnout.

    When a White House is under siege, no one wants to talk to anyone. Literally, anything you say can and will be used against you. When you're in a meeting and you see one of your colleagues taking notes, you start to wonder how long it will be before you're interrogated based on her notes. Maybe she's doodling. Or maybe she's digging your grave. The mind tries to focus on the task at hand, but the grand jury is never far from your thoughts.


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