Politics swings like a pendulum.
Ed Gillespie
I'm an American first, and I think that's how most people are.
One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned.
I believe we're the party of small business.
And so it was interesting for me to find myself very enamored of a Republican president, but Ronald Reagan was someone I thought captured the spirit of America.
So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.
When you look at where the Democratic field is going relative to foreign policy, they are increasingly moving away from a policy of pre-emptive self-defense that the president has adopted since September 11.
Well, I think the Republican Party is the more populist party.
If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.
Well, my wife, Cathy Gillespie, worked for Joe Barton, who was running for Congress in 1984.
I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political person, one of the things I appreciated about this president, in the past year especially, is he is a fantastic candidate.
On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.
I do not believe the American people are going to confuse hatred for passion.
People like passion in politics.
They do believe that if we do not wage this war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it waged in Baltimore and Kansas.
I accept people for who they are and love them. That doesn't mean I have to agree or that I have to turn my back on the tenets of my faith and reject the tenets of my faith when it comes to homosexuality.
We are seeing at the Republican National Committee a phenomenon that is worth noting this week; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, we will have a million first time donors since the president took office.
The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes.
The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation's history.
I think one of the problems the Democrats have today is that they are an elitist party.
I don't believe we're the party of big business.
We are in favor of greater free markets.
Our party may have swung too far right at various times.
The Democratic Party is getting very angry, and that came through clearly in this election.
But I think there was a sense amongst the House Republicans especially that we didn't just want to be opposed to Bill Clinton; that we wanted to tell the country what we were for and to brand ourselves in a more positive manner.
Even as a partisan Republican, I'm not sure a 40-year run is healthy for either party.
Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now.
George W. Bush is not only a great president; he was a great candidate.
I think Karl Rove saw that in George W. Bush early on and understood the impact that he could have on Texas politics and probably on national politics.
Texas is now a cornerstone of the electoral college for Republicans.
If you're a governor of a big state, people sense your presence a little bit, even your fellow governors.
When you were a volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign, you came in the morning; you had a supervisor who gave you a list of calls to make and a time to do it in.
I don't think we're as divided as many in the elite would have us believe.
I'm a dedicated Republican and a proud party man.
