Any time a party has lost three consecutive elections, it becomes a bit more willing to explore the notion of principled compromise so it's able to pursue some of its objectives.
— Evan Bayh
Every once in a while, an election comes along, and who you are and what you believe gets subsumed in a larger tide. It just happens.
The fastest-growing part of the Pentagon's budget are health care expenses.
We all have things in life we'd do over again.
Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.
Tim Kaine is a good man.
If you are the executive, you're probably going to have more of an impact than if you're one of a hundred members of the Senate, certainly one of 435 members of the House.
It doesn't take a degree in economics to know that something is wrong when it takes $30 or $40 to fill up the gas tank.
The United States depends on South Korea and Japan to help promote American values in East Asia.
As Democrats, we have a patriotic duty and political imperative to lay out our ideas for protecting America.
Americans have always prized individuality - it is part of our national DNA - but America is a community that draws strength from the sum of our people and has always known that the total of that sum is worth far more than its individual parts.
Through our own hard work and ingenuity, America has spent much of its history as the world's dominant economic power. But our dominance is not pre-ordained - history does not roll along on the wheels of inevitability.
My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.
Companies that are publicly held have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to try to maximize their profits within ethical reasons.
Between being governor and part of the Senate, one of the things I did was I held a chair at the business school at my alma mater, Indiana University. And I'd go to lecture the graduates, and I loved that, answering their questions. It was real; it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day.
Sometimes making progress a step at a time is better than no progress at all.
Washington is totally out of touch with mainstream America.
The most important area for spending restraint is entitlement reform.
I love my father, and I believe in him. And he lost to Dan Quayle. I had a hard time understanding how that could happen.
Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.
My mother wrote a book. Unfortunately, it ended up being published posthumously. But I'm glad she did, because it taught me a lot about my family that, otherwise, I probably wouldn't know.
Any time a president is re-elected, he has a little more political clout to get things done.
I like a lot of my Republican colleagues, starting with my friend from Indiana, Senator Lugar. We've had an excellent relationship.
I'm a former governor, and so I was the chief executive, and when the legislature wasn't in session, I was running the state.
Sometimes, when I come back to Washington from Indiana, I feel like an ambassador to a foreign country.
China's island-building in the South China Sea poses a threat to U.S. national security interests in the region.
We need a foreign policy that is both tough... and smart. The good news? That is the historic legacy of the Democratic Party.
A few decades ago, the Irish decided they were tired of being always near the bottom of Europe's economic indicators. So they envisioned a better future for their country, and they put their people on the right road to get there.
Sometimes, it takes leaving to gain some perspective. I see that clearly every time I leave Washington, D.C., and return to Indiana. I see the bizarre bubble that seems to enclose the Beltway and makes people forget what regular people care about.
While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father's time.
My father was on the Judiciary Committee all 18 years. He had a good personal relationship with Jim Eastland. They probably didn't agree on practically anything, or very little, from a public policy standpoint. But they were willing to work through that to see what they could get done just because they knew each other and liked each other.
Sometimes you have to make tough decisions to hold the line on spending.
We shouldn't have someone working in the Oval Office trying to discredit and smear a private individual who's just speaking their mind about an important issue facing the country. That is not going to move our nation forward.
I believe I would be a very strong general-election candidate.
To regain our political footing, we must prove to moderates that Democrats can make tough choices.
I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view.
Ultimately, the American people ourselves need to decide we care more about practical solutions and progress than we do about brain-dead ideology and political wrangling.
I care about family issues.
I've never stopped being a Hoosier.
I've always cared about education, and I worked with Senator Schumer on making several thousand dollars of college tuition tax deductible. That will help a lot of your middle class families make college more affordable.
I intend to continue to fight for the things I think are right for my country.
The United States must not allow North Korea to exacerbate tensions between our key strategic allies in Asia. As the leader of the free world, the United States needs to support our regional allies who are standing up to a Stalinist regime that is intent on developing nuclear weapons.
As with any difficult challenge that the public and policymakers face, there is no single solution or silver bullet that will serve as the answer to how the United States works to reduce carbon emissions.
We need leaders who appeal to us to think about something other than narrow self-interest but instead focus upon the greater good.
We know that a college degree is rapidly becoming the price of admission to the global economy.
It shouldn't take a constitutional crisis or an attack on the nation to create honest dialogue in the Senate.
Many good people serve in Congress. They are patriotic, hard-working, and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before.
No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.
If, by demanding revolutionary change, I run the risk of accomplishing nothing on behalf of the public, then I'm not sure that's a responsible course of action.
The only way Democrats can govern in this country is by making common cause with moderates and independents.
