Quote

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

You know, there is a long tradition in the U.S. of, um, promoting elections up to the point that you get an outcome you don't like. Look at Latin America in the Cold War.

Eventually I foresee voting on the Internet, which will lead to much more direct democracy.

Everybody is looking for an election where they can do something and participate.

We're like a Third World country when it comes to some of our election practices.

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

Is the purpose of free elections to allow the most clever and vicious person to aggregate power, or is the purpose of free elections to enable the American people to have a serious conversation about their country's future and try to find both a policy and a personality that they think will carry to them that better future?

I think American interests are served when there are sections of the world that have representative governments, politically open economic systems, and are willing to take a stand against some of the more extreme ideologies that there are around the world.

Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols.

Everything in our foreign and domestic policy is a question of issue for the American people to vote on.