Illustration by Luke Bott
• If you don’t have moral character before you walk into this office, you won’t have it when you leave.
• With every decision you make in the governor’s office, the popular decisions have already been made and others have already taken credit. So you get to make the decision when there are no easy answers.
• You have all of these conflicting interests pushing you all the time, saying, “You have to do this because in the future you’re going to need my help.” If you start playing that too long, you get into such a mess, intellectually and emotionally, that you don’t know who you are and you lose focus of representing the people.
• Always surround yourself with good people—hopefully people brighter than you are and who are comfortable enough to disagree with you.
• People ask, “Now that you’re governor, how do I get to know you?” If you don’t know me already, your chances are pretty slim.
• I always encourage anybody who’s running for the first time to go door-to-door, not only because it’s effective, but because it educates you about constituents and who you are supposed to represent.
• Some political leaders have been successful because they played one interest against another. As long as we continue to let one interest fight another, we’re going to continue to lose economic prowess in this global economy. We must work together.
• About 85 percent of discretionary funding is in education, healthcare, and corrections. If politicians say they can make major budget cuts without affecting those areas, then they’re not being honest with you.
• If you’re ambitious, you have to hit the ground running. And today in politics, you don’t hit the ground running by reading budget books or studying resources—you do it by being on the front page of the newspaper. I don’t think the public is well-served by that.
• If you’re a challenger to an incumbent, all you have to say is, “Well, I would’ve done it better,” and nobody can really argue with you, because there’s no basis as to whether they’re right or wrong.
• We all like to say we control our own destiny. But to some extent, you’re at the mercy of the economy, and nobody has total control over it. For our country to grow and prosper, our system was designed to frustrate everybody and force compromise.
