But when I didn’t win the election ..

Garner: Before we get off the electoral process, they wanted me to run for Governor [of California] about 8 years ago — ahem — and I didn't want to do it. I wasn't gonna get in with that--
Tavis Smiley: Now you wish you had.
Garner: No, no, no.
Tavis Smiley: Hey, Arnold [Schwarzenegger] won.
Garner: No. I think I could have won easy, but I don't think that they ought to have somebody like me or Schwarzenegger as Governor. It's no way to run a state.

He lost the election, and I regret that he did, but they did. He had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made.

No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my election.

People who run for office and are defeated aren’t rejected in the usual sense of the word. They’re just defeated because they couldn’t get enough votes that one time. It doesn’t mean the public despises them. It’s a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that’s all. The examples I’ve given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln’s cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don’t become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don’t have any trouble.

I decided to run for office because the people who were running our affairs over several decades were not doing a good job of it. We were living through a shameful and incongruous situation where we were known to be a country with huge resources, but where the overwhelming majority of the people lived in abject poverty... It weighed on my heart that the students I was teaching could not enjoy the same standard of education I had.

They couldn't include me in it because I was the President, and I can be elected as often as I want to be. I'm going to run again when I'm ninety. I've announced that a time or two, and you know, some damn fool looked the situation over and said, "When you're ninety, it's an off year," so I can't even run then. I didn't know I was going to stir up all that trouble . . .

In 1997, if you had asked me if I would run for the presidency, I would have thought you were crazy. However, as I traveled back and forth from Germany to Zambia and witnessed the economic decline and poverty, I started to rethink my position.

Of course, I faced opposition. The first time I ran (for the office), I lost by a few votes because I ran against a man. During the campaign, because I had to go round the faculties and talk to individuals, people asked me who would look after my home if I became the DVC and were in top management.

;Dan Gaffney *:They say that, that you got less votes than he did.

A guy who didn't have the guts to run for president. Little Michael. He doesn't know anything about me. But he never had the guts to run. He probably wished he did but he didn't. He spent millions of dollars on polling but he was missing one thing: guts. Little Michael.

I guess my biggest failure was not getting reelected. [The loss taught me] not to ever let American hostages be held for 444 days in a foreign country without extracting them. I did the best I could, but I failed.

had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race

By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party.