“I think the most dangerous thing we could do, ironically, is to try to play it safe.”Tagged: danger, Playing It Safe
“I think that it's been difficult, even confusing, to figure out what our foreign policy is because Democrats became so absorbed in opposing whatever the Republicans were doing.”Tagged: Partisanship, Democrats, Republicans
“Americans, as a general rule, tend to elect whoever appears to be the opposite of the president they've just had.”Tagged: Americans, Presidential Cycles
“I think we will all be better off when we are in a world where we can no longer say that people are being held back by their race.”Tagged: racism, Progress
“I believe that China is using technology for the perfection of dictatorship and that their fundamental economic and political model is a major challenge to the US.”Tagged: China, Intellectual Theft, Dictatorship
“We're talking about foreign interference in American politics. And by the way, this isn't hypothetical. This isn't theoretical. We were attacked by a hostile foreign power that decided that they could damage America, destabilize America, by intervening in the election to help him win. And they did…”Tagged: foreign interference, American Politics, election meddling
“I talk a lot, for example, about freedom. I think freedom is something that, across my lifetime, has been talked about as though it were a conservative value. But it's an American value, and I don't think that you enjoy freedom if you're afraid to start a new business because leaving your old job…”Tagged: Freedom, healthcarte, Conservative
“I also come from the industrial Midwest, the exact part of the country where Democrats had trouble getting our message through in recent years, which is part of how we got the president that we have now. And I'm someone who's committed to taking on the flaws in our systems at a very basic level. Our…”Tagged: Midweast, Democrats, Donald Trump
“It doesn't work with just any outsider — it matters what you care about and whether you're committed to uniting, rather than dividing the American people as president.”Tagged: Outsider, Uniting, Dividing, American People, President
“What's really important right now is not just the diversity of the field, but the answers that we're offering to the American people. That's what the voters are going to make their decision based on.”Tagged: Election 2020, Diversity, ]Voters
“Of all the things we’ve been up against as a country, only one of them actually came convincingly close to permanently ending the American project, and that was white supremacy during the course of the Civil War. And I am now convinced that, if we don’t tackle that in my lifetime, it could wreck the…”Tagged: Civil War, White Supremacy, The American Project
“Another way to think of it is this: Americans usually want something along the lines of the opposite of whatever we’ve just had in the Presidency. And I might be the one person who can say that, whether it’s President Trump or President Pence, I represent the opposite of what we have just had.”Tagged: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, voting, Opposite
“I think my understanding of why politics matters is different. It’s more rooted in everyday life. Part of that’s a mayor’s orientation. Part of it’s my Midwestern orientation. Part of it’s my personal story as somebody who saw, for example, the Afghanistan War, not just in terms of the theoretical…”Tagged: Politics, Midwest, Afghan War, Grounded
“Where I am right now in the mix is roughly where the eventual nominee almost always has been in the year before the vote, if history is any guide. And I think where this is going to shake out is, if you really do want the candidate with the most years of Washington experience, the most familiar face…”Tagged: Democratic Primaries, Democratic Nominee, Experience
“Right now, there are a lot of lines being drawn about who gets to be American. And it speaks to a bigger crisis of belonging in this country. My candidacy, in many ways, is a response to that crisis of belonging.”Tagged: American Identity, Crisis of Belonging
“When you’re a mayor, there’s no waving away. If there is a hole in the road, and you didn’t fill it in, and somebody calls you out on it, you don’t get to say, 'That’s fake news. It’s a great road. There’s no hole in it.' Because they’ll look at the hole and they’ll know.”Tagged: mayor, South Bend, Fake News
“I think any time you run for office you should ask two sets of questions. One: What does the office need? What does the next occupant of that office have to do? And then you ask the question: Who am I, and what do I bring to the table that’s different from the others? And then you look for a match.…”Tagged: Public Office, Politicians, Timing
“We can’t pretend that the Trump presidency is this weird anomaly that we can just kind of recover from by returning to the old normal. We are where we are because normal didn’t work.”Tagged: Trump Presidency, Anomaly, normal