2008 Democratic Convention Quotes

From Bill Clinton speech-
People are more impressed by the power of our example rather than the example of our power ... ~ Bill Clinton

For many Americans, the image of the police as a protection force diminished significantly during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when nation-wide television broadcasts showed members of the Chicago Police force brutally clubbing and using tear gas on young white Americans. For many, the scene was reminiscent of the days when police indiscriminately beat African Americans during peaceful protest marches in segregated southern states. ~ Lee P. Brown

The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader. ~ Mary Frances Berry

Alinsky's 1971 book, 'Rules for Radicals,' is a favorite of the Obamas. Michele Obama quoted it at the Democratic Convention. One Alinsky tactic is to 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' That's what the White House did in targeting Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer. ~ Karl Rove

I chaired the 1982 Democratic Party Commission on Presidential Nominations that created certain automatic delegates to the Democratic convention - the 'superdelegates.' It was a good idea then, and it is still a good idea. ~ Jim Hunt

I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today. ~ Ronald Reagan

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention. ~ Gloria Steinem

John Kerry is busy trying to raise money right now for his campaign. It was reported today that Kerry's hoping to raise $80 million before the Democratic convention. That's a lot of money. Yeah, Kerry has two ways to raise the $80 million: soliciting Democratic donors and going through his wife's purse. ~ Conan O'Brien

She isn't simply unafraid of a good fight, she lives for it, and will often actively go looking for a fight. This is what differentiates your run-of-the-mill fighter from a crusader. The Warrior Princess Submissive is no shrinking violet. She is that dyed-in-the-wool Republican who attends the Democratic National Convention wearing a Rand Paul t-shirt. She is the African-American woman who invites herself to a Ku Klux Klan rally without a hood... and hands out business cards to everyone there. She is the woman who invites the Jehovah's Witnesses into her home and feeds them dinner, just for the opportunity to defend Christmas - even though she may be a Pagan.
When the other girls in high school or college were trying out for the pep squad or cheerleading, she set her sights on the debate team. While her friends agonize over how to "fit in" socially, she is war gaming ideas on how to change society to fit her ideals and principles. Are you someone she considers to be immoral or evil? Run. She will eviscerate you. ~ Michael Makai

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington. ~ Michael Beschloss

Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry's daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. ~ Jay Leno

Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination. ~ Dick Morris

In the run-up to the 1992 Democratic convention, Clinton's campaign realized that voters thought the young governor had a privileged upbringing. They didn't buy his alleged concern for the middle class. ~ Dee Dee Myers

You look at women at the Republican convention and women at the Democratic convention. Republicans have a certain aesthetic beauty that involves more makeup, bigger hair, more lurid outfits. ~ Ron Reagan

The 2008 Democratic presidential candidates would be wise to note that unwarranted negativism is dangerous and badly underestimates the strengths of the American people to adapt to and prosper with change. ~ Bernard L. Schwartz

I think the country is very settled in a lot of ways, and we saw that after the Democratic Convention. I think a lot of the bump that we enjoyed came when John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate. ~ Harold Ford, Jr.

Contact often has the effect of hardening hostilities, not dissolving barriers. This effect is common in politics. When Jesse Jackson was running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, his percentage of the white vote was consistently highest in those states with the fewest blacks. Whites with the most actual contact with blacks were least likely to vote for him. The same was true in 2008 during Barack Obama's Democratic primary campaigns. He won the highest percentages of the white vote in states such as Iowa, which has few blacks, and the lowest percentages in states with large black populations. Bernard N. Grofman of the University of California, Irvine has found a reliable political correlation: As the number of blacks rises, more whites vote Republican - and the less likely they are to vote for black candidates. It is whites whose knowledge about blacks is filtered by the media rather than gained first-hand who have the most favorable impression of them. The alleged benefits of diversity seem illusory to the people who actually experience it. ~ Jared Taylor

During the 2008 campaign, I strongly endorsed Barack Obama for president. I did so early, when many Democratic leaders - including many prominent African-American politicians - believed the safe bet was to back then-front-runner Hillary Clinton. ~ Douglas Wilder

I didn't know you were Catholic. (to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he got down on one knee to beg Pelosi to find Democratic support for the bailout bill)-2008 ~ Nancy Pelosi

At a national political convention, you have hundreds of people who consider themselves at least as important as the Secretary of Commerce. If it's a Democratic convention, you also have dozens of A-list Hollywood and music celebrities. (If it's a Republican convention, you have Bo Derek.) Also you have swarms of lower-ranking Washington minions with titles like Deputy Assistant to the Associate Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff who are trying to move up the ladder to Deputy Associate to the Assistant Acting Deputy Assistant Understudy. ~ Dave Barry

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair. ~ James Vance

I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ..."~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008 ~ Barack Obama

I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities. ~ Ben Wikler

The Clintons are very close with everybody on the Democratic side. ~ Martin O'Malley

I feel sanguine enough to say that there has never been a better set of conditions for open democratic politics because there is no need for unified front politics. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

I can't believe that Hillary Clinton wants the world to think that whenever she gets into political trouble, she's going to have her husband come roaring about, breaking furniture, sucking up oxygen, spewing carbon dioxide. My impression is that she's strong enough to defend herself - she certainly showed that in the recent Democratic debate. But apparently she's not strong enough to control Mr. Bill ... and if that's the case, any sane voter would have to think twice before enabling this sort of circus act in the White House. ~ Joe Klein

Our democratic values also include - and our national security demands - open and transparent government. Some information obviously needs to be protected. And since his first days in office, President Obama has worked to strike the proper balance between the security the American people deserve and the openness our democratic society expects. ~ John O. Brennan

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. ~ Doris Lessing

I farther assure this noble Duke, that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government loaded with all its encumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its Commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a Jockey of Norfolk [Thomas Paine], who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit. ~ Edmund Burke

Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored. ~ Ken Liu

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. ~ Jacques Ellul

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' m ~ Wilhelm Reich

In all likelihood, a significant amount of time will be required to restore the nearly eight and a half million jobs that were lost nationwide over 2008 and 2009. ~ Ben Bernanke

The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest. ~ Edward Bernays

I did a lot of reading. I read about democratic socialism. And I read about the efforts of people for such a long time trying to create a society in which all people can live with dignity. And that's kind of what I believe. ~ Bernie Sanders

When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question. ~ Naomi Klein

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years? ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I want to see working people and young people come into the party in a way that doesn't exist now. And you know what, I want a 50-state strategy so the Democratic Party is not just the party of 25 states. ~ Bernie Sanders

In the Social Democratic jargon of the time, the term 'propaganda' had connotations that were very different from those it later acquired. It did not mean simplistic messages used to bombard passive targets, but rather an intensive and wide-ranging education that was initiated by the workers. 'Propagandized worker' was therefore a title of honour, an indication of potential leader status. ~ Lars T. Lih

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark. ~ Friedrich Hayek

Most people don't really want to think independently or make decisions; they're herd animals with herd instincts to keep to the middle of the group where it's safest, don't stand out too much, don't move too far away from convention, etc. They want to be led and dictated to. But they're stubborn, mulish animals and they like to think they're independent and free. ~ Blanche Barton

a country can be too small, too socially knitted, too tightly tied for its own good. Strong social networks can, in certain circumstances, turn to incestuous corruption and the shutting down of democratic discourse. You ~ Michael Booth

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. ~ Noam Chomsky

[On the Democratic Party:] Its leaders are always troubadors of trouble; crooners of catastrophe ... A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him. ~ Clare Boothe Luce

People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it. ~ Megan Fox

There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits. ~ Margaret Atwood