George Will: “We have a president who believes, because he says so, that ATMs and airport ticket kiosks cause unemployment. So that gives you some sense of his grasp of how the economy works.“
George Will: “Mr. Obama, the night he clinched the nomination, said this will be the moment when the rise of the seas stop. Well, if he can stop the seas from rising, why can’t he bring down the gas prices?”
Rush Limbaugh: “I’m a guy on the radio. What can I do? I can’t raise anybody’s taxes. I can’t send anybody off to war. I can’t force anybody to go out and buy a $50 light bulb. I can’t make anybody give up their car and buy an electric car. I can’t make anybody do anything, and yet I have to be destroyed.”
President Obama to the UAW in Detroit: “And five years from now when I’m not president anymore, I’ll buy [a Chevy Volt] and drive it myself.” GM has suspended the building of Volts this week.
A New York Times correction: “A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president’s proposals to reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them.”
President Barack Obama: “We’ve gone through three of the toughest years this country has gone through in my lifetime.”
Rush Limbaugh: “The Democrats don’t have one thing they can run on. There’s not one aspect of Obama’s first term that they can say, ‘If you want four more years of this, vote for us.’ They have to create fear, hatred, loathing, impugn the character, all that, of Republicans — and that’s what they do.”
Democratic chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “[Contraception costs] about $700 a year. That’s real money.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “[Free contraception] is a no-cost benefit, that…actually is a cost reducer.”
Rush Limbaugh: “We need a morning-after pill for presidential elections.”
Clint Eastwood: “It’s halftime in America.”
President Barack Obama: “I deserve a second term.”
President Obama: “I hear folks running around calling this class warfare, this is not class warfare—let me tell you something: asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary, that’s just common sense.”
Joe Biden to Nancy Pelosi: “There’s not a single, solitary thing on our agenda that would have gotten done without your leadership. Those decisions you made, the risk you took, the losses we incurred, really did save this country.”
Jay Carney: “The President…spends a relatively small amount of time campaigning.”
Senate majority leader Harry Reid: “In spite of the conservative obstructionism, we’ve been able to get a lot of good things done. [According to congressional scholar Norman] Ornstein said it was the most productive Congress in the last 75 years.”
First Lady Michelle Obama: “I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here and a strong woman. But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced. That I’m some angry black woman.”
Oprah Winfrey on Barack Obama: “I think he is, uh, a masterful leader and I think that what it takes to be able to do that on a daily basis and to stand up in a world where everybody is open to attacking you all the time, very hard job…I’m proud of him.”
President Barack Obama: “We’ve already seen change take pace. 2012 is about reminding the American people how far we’ve traveled.”
DNC Chief Wasserman Schultz: “Frankly, the collection of Republicans that are running for president really are pretty unremarkable. They all embrace extremism and embrace the Tea Party.”
