Quotes & Sayings About Obama 2008

In 2008, as a matter of fact, I had people accusing me of being a Senator Obama supporter because I wouldn't slam him. I said, 'Well, consider the fact that I voted for impeachment for President Clinton, but it wasn't a personal vote. I voted based on the facts and the law and the Constitution and what we were dealing with.' — J. C. Watts

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don't get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were. — Barack Obama

If both John McCain and Obama were given a sip of truth serum, both would admit they made serious mistakes in choosing running mates in 2008. — Douglas Wilder

If Scott Brown can win in a state that President Obama won by 26 points, I can win in a district that Obey won by just 20 points against an unknown, underfunded challenger in the Democratic landslide of 2008. It means there is not a single Democrat in the country who is safe. — Sean Duffy

Obama's election to the presidency in 2008 was treated more like a
coronation, if not an intense religious ritual, by the establishment press and
a fawning, glassy-eyed majority of Americans. Anyone who questioned
anything at all about Obama was deemed to be a "hater" or, even worse,
a racist. — Donald Jeffries

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.
By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.
Just as I'd hoped. — Michael J. Fox

Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was ... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain. — Jeff Greenfield

this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ..."~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008 — Barack Obama

Here's why Sarah Palin says she won't be running for president. She says she can be more effective at getting others elected by not running. And I thought, well, that's true, because in 2008 she got Obama elected. — David Letterman

Obama's judges share his contempt for the original meaning of the Constitution. He has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress. In a 2001 interview that surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign, he made this very clear: the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren had failed to break "free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," Obama told the host of a radio show. — Phyllis Schlafly

If everybody that voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election. We will win this election. — Barack Obama

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he - like me and like all of us - carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is 'a double standard' at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when [ ... ] we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice. — Christopher Hitchens

During the 2008 election, I made clear to the Obama campaign that I don't think it's wise for me to force my personal political agenda on anyone. — Questlove

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work. — Jesse Jackson

I took a lot of heat from Republicans when I stepped out of John McCain's campaign after the 2008 primaries. I still supported McCain, and voted for him, but I just didn't want to be the tip of the spear attacking Obama. — Mark McKinnon

In 2008, I was one of the young feminist whippersnappers who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries - or as many of my older counterparts called me at the time, a traitor. — Jessica Valenti

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama's star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. — Edward Snowden

Politics thrives on simple, clean messages, something that played to Obama's advantage in 2008. Stagnant unemployment and the loss of America's AAA rating are as simple and tough as they come. This is the economy on Obama's watch, and there's no one left to blame. — John Sununu

In 2008, Barack Obama was the electoral equivalent of the Hula Hoop; a political Pet Rock; a craze, a fad, an irrational gadget. The latest have-to-have, must-vote-for candidate. — Mondo Frazier

If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for [Barack] Obama but also for the Democrats. — John Howard

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children. — Mara Liasson

In the Democratic primary in 2008, the Obama team devised a strategy to use the caucuses and a complicated system of awarding delegates in the state primaries to sneak up on Hillary Clinton and establish a lead Obama never surrendered. — John Podhoretz

What I'm slowly realizing is that I believe that most of us felt that we could relax a little bit after November 2, 2008, because of the progress and the spirit that it took to get Barack Obama in The White House. And what we didn't realize, is that was really the beginning. That was really the beginning of the struggle and not the end of a struggle, to come from colonial times through slavery, through the Jim Crowe Laws, through the civil rights period to The White House as, like a point A/point B journey. Point B of course being the end. — Questlove

I'm proud that Colorado delivered a victory to Barack Obama in 2008 and we will do so again in 2012. — Ken Salazar

During the 2008 campaign, I strongly endorsed Barack Obama for president. I did so early, when many Democratic leaders - including many prominent African-American politicians - believed the safe bet was to back then-front-runner Hillary Clinton. — Douglas Wilder

Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama's approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from Star Trek. The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory. — Bob Woodward

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was 'light-skinned' and lacked a 'Negro dialect.' — Monica Crowley

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent. — John Podhoretz

Recall that in April 2008 candidate Obama - unaware that a blogger was recording his remarks at a private fundraiser for moneyed Bay Area radicals - dismissed religion as a consolation for the "bitter" in Middle America. Contained within this one remark was the seed of secularist bigotry toward the religious that would come to full and odorous flower in his first term. — Phyllis Schlafly

One of the greatest weaknesses of Chris Mitchell's editorship of the Australian is that he has allowed Greg Sheridan to remain his foreign editor throughout. Sheridan is a man who argued in different columns that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of our era; that unlike mediocre politicians like Barack Obama and John McCain, the "new star" of American politics, Sarah Palin, was able to combine "celebrity" with "character"; that President Obama's "anti-Israel hysteria" was leading his administration toward "licensing a mutant strain of anti-semitism"; and that the United States would most likely be strengthened by the crash of Wall Street in September 2008. — Robert Manne

It's disappointing that President Obama - who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president - has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history. — Raul Labrador

Poverty existed before January 20, 2008, OK? Before President Obama took office. — Hill Harper

In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years. — George Will

After the Republican Party did everything that Colin Powell says it needs to do to grow, and nominated the very kind of candidate he wanted in 2008, what did Powell do? He endorsed Obama! So according to the Drive-Bys and David Gergen, Republicans should let somebody who campaigned and voted for Obama, tell us how to build our party. — Rush Limbaugh

If you think all these terrible things about Obama, he asked the woman, how can you possibly be undecided?

Because if McCain dies, Palin would be president, she said. — John Heilemann

Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse ... I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008. — Oliver Stone

The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion. — Noam Chomsky

The lesson of the Clinton years and of Obama's win of both the nomination and the general election in 2008 is that Democrats need to be as tough as JFK was. — Jon Meacham

My concern about Barack Obama is he ran a campaign in 2008 where he said we're going to bring people together and solve big problems. And he specifically talked about the need to reach across the aisle and deal with issues like the economy, which was obviously the top issue in 2008. It has not happened. — Rob Portman

The top group of fundraisers for Mr. Obama raised $457,834 for his 2008 campaign - and were approved for federal grants and loans of $11.4 billion, according to the Government Accountability Institute. Selling access to the federal treasury has been a great way for Democrats to raise campaign funds. Since 1989, according to an analysis by Gateway Pundit, big donors have provided $416 million more in direct contributions to Democrats than Republicans. — Jack Kelly

Obama seemed poised to realign American politics after his stunning 2008 victory. But the economy remains worse than even the administration's worst-case scenarios, and the long legislative battles over health care reform, financial services reform and the national debt and deficit have taken their toll. Obama no longer looks invincible. — Dee Dee Myers

According to the National Gardening Association, food gardening is now a $3.5 billion industry. In 2013, 37 million home gardens were growing food, an increase of four million since 2008. Even First Lady Michelle Obama joined the trend, planting a "kitchen garden" on the White House (back) lawn. Gardeners' most popular motivations: better-tasting food and lower grocery bills. — Anonymous

As our values are the core to who we are as human beings, they are also the easiest way to identify and connect with others in meaningful ways. Think about it - most political campaigns are based around values. Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign galvanized millions of youth behind two very clear values - hope and change. — Adam Braun

In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket. — James Wolcott

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. — Glenn Greenwald

One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation. He appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense, the Army and Transportation. He appointed a Vice President who ran against him in 2008. — William J. Clinton

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Obama's victory in November 2008 was a historic political accomplishment. — John Podhoretz

Ever since Obama's election team and media thugs made me famous for asking a simple question in 2008, I've had more than my share of death threats by people who are by definition at least a little crazy. — Joe Wurzelbacher

George W. Bush in 2000 went to private financing for the nomination, but he accepted public funding in the general. And, quite frankly, so did - it was broken in 2008, when Barack Obama decided he wasn't going to do that. — Mark Shields

In time, the media was fawning over Henry Stein like Barack Obama in 2008; he represented something different. Governor Stein began holding FP rallies across the country, attracting tens of thousands of supporters, waving signs and willing to plaster their entire neighborhoods with as much propaganda as they could get their hands on. After winning two terms as governor in Florida, it became inevitable that he should be a candidate for President of the United States in 2036. Henry — James Rosone

It was all for the eventual payoff and thank-you by giving Hillary Clinton the Democrat Party presidential nomination. And it went awry in 2008 because somebody they liked better came along. Somebody they really liked better. I mean, somebody they loved better. They threw her overboard like an unwanted sack of potatoes down on the farm for Barack Hussein Obama. And she seethed, felt betrayed. Don't blame her a bit. They betrayed her big time. — Rush Limbaugh

When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 as her father's rightful heir, she laid upon him the mantle of Camelot and the enduring mystique of John F. Kennedy, who, according to polls, continues to be America's most beloved president. — Kitty Kelley

Back in 2008, candidate Obama called a $10 trillion national debt 'unpatriotic' - serious talk from what looked to be a serious reformer. Yet by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined. One president, one term, $5 trillion in new debt. — Paul Ryan

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things. — Christopher Hitchens

Main Street versus Wall Street was the 2008 economic mantra of Democrat Barack Obama. — Nina Easton

In 2008 all the stars aligned perfectly for Obama's 6-point victory over John McCain. He was an inexperienced, untested neophyte, and successfully convinced enough voters to paint their own version of what hope-and-change was all about on the blank canvas he provided. — Bob Beauprez

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss. — Alveda King

I really believed Obama when he spoke in 2008, but I remember watching his victory speech after this last election and it was the same speech. Exactly the same speech. I felt like he didn't even believe it anymore. He seemed to be tired of saying the same thing. — Andrew Dominik

What religious Americans might have been slow to realize is that the ACLU's long march through the institutions of America has culminated at the door of Obama's White House. Behind that door stands the one we have "been waiting for," as liberals chanted about Obama in 2008. Obama is the fulfillment of the ACLU's messianic secularist hopes. No president has done more to empty the public square of Christians than Barack Obama. To the delight of secularists, Obama has been stacking the federal courts with ACLU-style judges who read the First Amendment through an ahistorical and atheistic prism, or as they like to call it, the "living Constitution," which is nothing more than a euphemism for whatever they think the Constitution should mean in our supposedly enlightened times. — Phyllis Schlafly

A New Campus: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ann Bowers. Steve Jobs, appearance before the Cupertino City Council, June 7, 2011. CHAPTER 41: ROUND THREE Family Ties: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Erin Jobs, Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Jennifer Egan. Email from Steve Jobs, June 8, 2010, 4:55 p.m.; Tina Redse to Steve Jobs, July 20, 2010, and Feb. 6, 2011. President Obama: Interviews with David Axelrod, Steve Jobs, John Doerr, Laurene Powell, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Schmidt, Austan Goolsbee. Third Medical Leave, 2011: Interviews with Kathryn Smith, Steve Jobs, Larry Brilliant. Visitors: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mike Slade. CHAPTER 42: LEGACY Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It (Yale, 2008), 2; Cory Doctorow, Why I Won't Buy an iPad, — Walter Isaacson

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. — Tariq Ali

The virus in the movie 'Contagion' is based on the bird flu which came out of nowhere back in 2008. Everyone thought it was going to change the way we live and it just faded away. Wait a minute, I'm talking about President Obama. — Craig Ferguson

The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate. — John Podhoretz

Then there is the matter of the presidential untruths. The problem is not just that Barack Obama says things that are untrue but that he lies about what Barack Obama has said. He brags that he set red lines, but then he says it was the U.N. had set red lines. He boasts of pulling out every U.S. soldier from Iraq but then alleges that President Bush, the Iraqis, or Maliki did that. He claims that ISIS are Jayvees but then claims they are serious. But his prevarication too is habitual and was known in 2008 when it was discovered that he had simply misled the nation about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He had no desire, in the transparent manner of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain, or George W. Bush, to release his medical records or college transcripts. If Americans find their president ill-informed, there was no record that he was informed in 2008. His gaffes were far more frequent than those of Sarah Palin, who knew there were 50 states. — Anonymous

In 2008, Obama won 56 percent of the women's vote to John McCain's 43 percent. It was the critical difference in the race. — Juan Williams

President Obama's re-election campaign said that this year they'll knock on 150 percent more doors than they did in 2008. Well, of course they will. They have to. There's so many foreclosures it's tough to tell where people live. — Jay Leno

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today
with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008] — Barack Obama

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ... '
She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently). — Christopher Hitchens

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. — Noam Chomsky

President Obama has been attacking relentlessly. In 2008 he said that if you're out of fresh ideas you use stale tactics against your opponent - you try and make your opponent unacceptable and that's what he is trying to do. — Rob Portman

Obama microtargeted his way to re-election by pitting Americans against each other in many instances. In order to confront the challenges the nation faces, he's really going to have to put his 2008 rhetoric about bringing people together into practice. Otherwise his legacy will only be that of a great campaigner whose promises fell short of accomplishment. — Kevin Madden

It's important to know that the vast majority of people who were excited in 2008 are still really enthusiastic. We've got more volunteers now than ever, and they're engaged, they're motivated, they're not paying attention to the ups and downs of polls or Washington. — Barack Obama

Obama has placed himself in perfect political position: he spent the 2008 campaign convincing the American people that he's a racial unifier rather than a divider, without any evidence to prove it. — Ben Shapiro

Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared. — Barack Obama

Barack Obama's inspirational whoosh to the presidency in 2008 was unusual. Most campaigns are less exhilarating; indeed, they are downright disappointing - until someone wins. — Joe Klein

Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008 ... That's why, over the past six years, we've done more than ever before to combat climate change, from the way we produce energy, to the way we use it. — Barack Obama

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama. — David Limbaugh

in 2008, shortly after being elected President, Barack Obama demonstrated to many academics and doctors that he had a clear understanding of the deep problems in health care, by committing to spend $1 billion on head-to-head trials of commonly used treatments, in order to find out which is best. In return he was derided by right-wing critics as 'anti-industry'. — Ben Goldacre

Though President Obama promised during the 2008 campaign to pass the DREAM Act, he never made it a priority and failed to bring Republicans and Democrats together to do it in his first term. — Juan Williams

Let's look at the amounts involved.5 When George W. Bush left office, the federal debt was $9 trillion. That's a huge amount, and Bush added nearly $4 trillion to the total, a disgraceful legacy caused primarily by profligate domestic spending and foreign wars. Bush's second term deficits averaged around $500 billion. But still, the $9 trillion represented America's entire debt accumulated from the founding through 2008. Now, under Obama, the federal debt is $18.5 trillion. It's larger than America's gross domestic product which is around $17 trillion. The debt will be over $19 trillion when Obama leaves office. While progressives professed to be scandalized by Bush's $500 billion deficits, they have remained silent while Obama racks up trillion-dollar deficits. — Dinesh D'Souza

It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos, and women, who powered our victory in 2008, stand together once again. — Barack Obama

This is a president [Barack Obama] who came into office in 2008 with a big majority in the House and with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Because of his policies and his conduct in office, seven years later, we have our largest majority in the House since 1928, and we have a majority in the Senate and we have 31 of the 60 governorships. — Chris Christie

I traveled with then-Senator Obama to Israel in 2008. I will never forget our time in the holy city of Jerusalem and following behind him as he approached the Western Wall - and even in the dark hours of that very early morning, it was a place bustling with energy afforded by one's faith. — Denis McDonough

Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken. — Rick Perlstein

The revival of the U.S. financial system after the crash of 2008 is arguably the Obama administration's biggest domestic policy success. — David Ignatius

Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy. — Glenn Greenwald

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. — Jesse Ventura

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that? — Christopher Hitchens

I think what people are looking for right now is not the kind of pizzazz and pop that perhaps we thought we got in 2008. Certainly, President Obama offered that. What they want now is someone who can work closely with Congress and get things done. — Rob Portman