If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.
I think if you hearken back to partial-birth abortion... everybody said, you know, it's not constitutional. It can't pass; it can't go anywhere, and it took time to do that, and it even had to succeed a presidential veto. But it eventually did.
It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'
Of all presidential perks, the pardon power has a special significance. It is just the kind of authority that would attract the special attention of someone obsessed with himself and his own ability to influence events.
After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office.
I had hoped that the current presidential campaign debates might educate the public as to what is really involved in the ongoing controversy over campaign financing.
No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.
We are all encouraged that Bush appears, really for the first time in his experience on the stage of presidential politics, relaxed. His comfort is our comfort.
From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.
The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.
I don't have any presidential aspirations. If the millennials want me to do it, I'd do it, though.
I can't comment on what every single presidential candidate is saying or doing.
On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.
In the 2004 presidential election, we saw a wonderful example of citizens making contributions. In fact, individual giving to both the Kerry and Bush campaigns was the highest in our nation's history.
Don't automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn't considered key aspects of the issue.
If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a President fresh from a war victory.
The 1980 Republican presidential contest might have been as good a roster of candidates as ever fielded by any party.
In 2004, Kucinich was the only presidential candidate who warned that a war in Iraq would be completely disastrous. I remember how mocked he was when he predicted hand-to-hand combat in Baghdad. I remember Candy Crowley, and other reporters as well, treating his views on the impending war as ridiculous, out there, almost insane.
One of the many, many salutary aspects of Barack Obama's impending presidential nomination is the sea change his victory marks in the battle for the mind-set of the American foreign policy establishment.
We often feel a twinge of guilt over our own fascination with presidential candidates' wives - as if we are secretly reading the 'Star' for our campaign information instead of the policy journals.
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.
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.
Presidential candidates don't chew gum.
My presidential victory, if it had happened, would have been artificial in relation to the Socialist party. It may be that on my deathbed, I will come to regret my decision, but for the moment, I live at peace with it.
American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump.
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.
In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.
Senator Badger did not call. During the whole of the last session of Congress, he did not call on me. He is a bitter partisan and is no doubt sensible that during the presidential canvass of 1844, he did me gross injustice.
A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.
Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.
With its emphasis on star power, the Obama campaign from Day One emphasized the candidate's perfectly cut presidential presence.
If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.
Voters like to fall in love with presidential candidates, at least a little bit.
Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
Political pandering comes in all shapes and sizes, but every four years the presidential primary bring us in contact with its purest form - praising ethanol subsidies amid the corn fields of Iowa.
