Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

For us political activists and candidates the morning after any election is a mix of emotions - the personal and the immediate the culmination of your own recent campaigning efforts and the fortunes of your party and the success or otherwise of what you stand for and believe in.

My mom was a diabetic. Her sister was a diabetic so I was already a candidate.

No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter but are quickly forgotten.

Research has shown that the perceived style of leadership is by far the most important thing to most voters in evaluating officeholders and candidates.

The secret to understanding me is I'm not trying to be anybody other than who I actually am. People want candid refreshing leadership. And I've always tried to go with solutions. You know I've always tried to say here's how we get our economy growing here's why we get our debt under control. That's what Mitt Romney is offering.

I am a candid interview and I have a dark and dry sense of humor - a very Canadian sense of humor and I am only learning now stupidly that you can't read tongue. When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny it doesn't read that way.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

Humor is very very risky particularly for a candidate unless he's been in so long that it just doesn't matter and he's not running for president. But it's just that people are so sensitive and so touchy and you're just going to upset somebody without ever realizing it.

To my great disappointment it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment - especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield Illinois.

Apparently a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

My main objective is to prepare candidates for professional baseball however the majority of our graduates will go home as much better qualified amateurs.

And I just think that we're at a point in our economic life here in our state - and - and candidly across the country where increased taxes is just the wrong way to go. The people of our state are not convinced that state government county government local government has done all they can with the money we already give them rather than the money that we have before.

Candidly I believe most corporations actually don't mind big government.

Well first of all I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is they believe that for years and years and years the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.