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I think I know a lot about campaigns.

Sooner or later, I need to begin to do what any candidate does in a presidential race; I need to begin to win.

I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.

When a campaign doesn't go my way, I always take a step back, look at the facts, and try to figure out what we could learn from that experience.

I could not find any way that we could really run the kind of campaign I wanted to run if we were targeting delegates and still trying to talk to people, which is what keeps me going as a human being.

If you're running for president, you've got to do a lot of things to line up a candidacy. I've not done any of those things. It's not my plan. My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation.

I had always thought about running for high political office, and I was kind of waiting for the stars to line up. And, you know, they don't hold the door open for you. You kind of have to muscle your way in.

I was considering running for political office.

I understand that people in the media want this to be a sprint every day, but the truth is a presidential campaign is a marathon.