Primary Quotes
It is primary season in the USA, and this year has seen what can be described as one of the most interesting nomination campaigns for many a year. With neither of the two American parties having a long-standing candidate-elect, the race to the autumn conventions has seen far more than the usual drama. Now, however, with John McCain as near a certainty as possible, the attention is now on the two ground-breakers: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Who will blink first? Can one win the nomination before August, or will it be up to the party convention and the whims of the super-delegates?
To reflect the events in the US, Susan Ratcliffe explores some of the quotes from American political figures.
American President Richard Nixon said many years ago that 'There is nothing wrong with this country which a good election can't fix', but the writer H. L. Mencken took a more cynical view, saying of Harry Truman's 1948 presidential campaign: 'If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense'.
The New York State Governor Mario Cuomo took a more generous line: 'You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose'. Some presidential candidates find the poetry difficult: George Bush famously dismissed 'the vision thing'.
The campaign can have many ups and downs, and perhaps all contenders would do well to remember a favourite saying of John McCain: 'In the words of Chairman Mao, it's always darkest before it's totally black'. It is all too easy to get it wrong, as Al Gore found out, later describing himself: 'I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America'. John F. Kennedy joked about the expense of the campaign, reporting a telegram from his father: 'Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide'.
But whatever the difficulties, each candidate has the same attitude as Hillary Clinton 'I'm in. And I'm in to win.' And ultimately, as Barack Obama said of a previous campaign, each remembers 'There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America'.
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