 Even as a partisan Republican, I'm not sure a 40-year run is healthy for either party. |
| I'm a dedicated Republican and a proud party man. |
| 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. |
| I think one of the problems the Democrats have today is that they are an elitist party. |
| If you're a governor of a big state, people sense your presence a little bit, even your fellow governors. |
| 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. |
| The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation's history. |
| Our party may have swung too far right at various times. |
| One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned. |
| 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 believe we're the party of small business. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now. |
| Well, I think the Republican Party is the more populist party. |
| 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. |
| People like passion in politics. |
| I don't believe we're the party of big business. |
| 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. |
