Campaign Endorsement Quotes

I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, the level of protection accorded to animal interests will always be low and animals will, under the best of circumstances, still be treated in ways that would constitute torture if applied to humans. By endorsing welfare reforms that supposedly make exploitation more “compassionate” or single-issue campaigns that falsely suggest that there is a coherent moral distinction between meat and dairy or between fur and wool or between steak and foie gras, we betray the principle of justice that says that all sentient beings are equal for purposes of not being used exclusively as human resources. And, on a practical level, we do nothing more than make people feel better about animal exploitation.

Christians are commanded to pray for those in political leadership, but they have no biblical mandate to use the Christian ministry or the cause of Christ to endorse or campaign for any politician. They are entitled to their own views and opinions, but they are not entitled to equate those views and opinions with Christian dogma.

To her delight, Elizabeth found that the politicians were far from the only people to support her campaign. Both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times wrote endorsing editorials of her work, while the Daily Illinois State Register was also an ally.

The Lawrence campaign keeps dropping by. They want us to endorse the president.” “You should,” I muttered. “Kate!” She made a sound like she was punching me through the phone. “Shut up, you know we’re not doing that. Mom and Papi love your dad, especially now. It’s not like he did anything to hurt us.” “He didn’t do anything to help either.” “Yeah, he did,” she said. “That day at our house. He listened.

Outside of the courtroom, in the dialogues we engage in and the discussions we have, we should be asking ourselves continually whether the stories we tell divide or unite. If we are casting ourselves collectively as victims, to what end are we doing so? Is there a way in which this is seemingly entitling us to collectively diminish others or to sanction acts that we wouldn’t otherwise feel entitled to endorse?

With apologies to Austin Ruse and the National Review, it’s passages like this, not any endorsement of the drug-fueled, last-minute allnighter, that explain why Hunter Thompson will always be celebrated by young people. It had nothing to do with drugs, the F word, or being cool, and everything to do with the fact that Thompson never lost his sense of appropriate outrage, never fell into the trap of accepting that moral compromise was somehow a sign of growth and adulthood. Both

After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.

Where radical politics once stood for full citizen empowerment, it now stood for the empowerment of professional politicians in state and national government; where it once endorsed democratic assemblies, it now recommended “the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns”; instead of complex social theory, its new métier was bumper-sticker slogans; and instead of stirring demands for revolution, it meekly begged for paltry reforms. People no longer wanted to dedicate themselves to a revolutionary project that might “require the labors and dedication of a lifetime.” Instead, they craved instant gratification and were willing to surrender their long-term ideals to get it. Indeed,

Pastor Max Lucado of San Antonio, Texas, said in an editorial for the Washington Post in February 2016 that he was “chagrined” by Trump’s antics. He ridiculed a war hero. He made a mockery of a reporter’s menstrual cycle. He made fun of a disabled reporter. He referred to a former first lady, Barbara Bush, as “mommy” and belittled Jeb Bush for bringing her on the campaign trail. He routinely calls people “stupid” and “dummy.” One writer catalogued 64 occasions that he called someone “loser.” These were not off-line, backstage, overheard, not-to-be-repeated comments. They were publicly and intentionally tweeted, recorded and presented.18 Lucado went on to question how Christians could support a man doing these things as a candidate for president, much less as someone who repeatedly attempted to capture evangelical audiences by portraying himself as similarly committed to Christian values. He continued, “If a public personality calls on Christ one day and calls someone a ‘bimbo’ the next, is something not awry? And to do so, not once, but repeatedly, unrepentantly and unapologetically? We stand against bullying in schools. Shouldn’t we do the same in presidential politics?” Rolling Stone reported on several evangelical leaders pushing against a Trump nomination, including North Carolina radio host and evangelical Dr. Michael Brown, who wrote an open letter to Jerry Falwell Jr., blasting his endorsement of Donald Trump. Brown wrote, “As an evangelical follower of Jesus, the contrast is between putting nationalism first or the kingdom of God first. From my vantage point, you and other evangelicals seem to have put nationalism first, and that is what deeply concerns me.”19 John Stemberger, president and general counsel for Florida Family Action, lamented to CNN, “The really puzzling thing is that Donald Trump defies every stereotype of a candidate you would typically expect Christians to vote for.” He wondered, “Should evangelical Christians choose to elect a man I believe would be the most immoral and ungodly person ever to be president of the United States?”20 A

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the establishment struck. Despite having raised tens of millions of dollars, and having run campaigns that were still seen in many circles as credible, two of the leading moderate Democrats in the race, Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, abruptly canceled their candidacies and endorsed Biden. Both flew to Texas, the most hotly contested of the primary states, to appear with the former vice president. They were joined by another former candidate, Texan Beto O’Rourke, in a highly choreographed show of support. The establishment had succeeded in uniting, in support of Biden, the candidates who had been dividing up the moderate vote. Meanwhile, the liberal and progressive vote continued to be divided between Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and myself. Despite poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, Warren chose to stay in the race. I was closer to her on the issues than any other candidate. But, at a point where her endorsement could have been significant in a number of Super Tuesday states, she chose not to give it. Even

Despite indications of affection, a strong Anti-Semitic bias remained. In an 1878 campaign speech Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama referred to a candidate as a 'Jew-dog,' and the following year Senator Morgan opposed the appointment of a postmaster in Montgomery because he had been endorsed 'by a parcel of Jews.' In Nashville, Tennessee, in 1878, Christian mothers threatened to withdraw their children from a private school for girls after two Jews had been accepted. The principal yielded to the pressure and rescinded the enrollments. And in a Rome, Georgia, courtroom in 1873, the plaintiff's attorney declared that one cannot accept the word of a Jew 'even under oath.' Louisiana had anti-Semitic demonstrations in the late 1880s. Then, in 1893, farmers in the Bayou state wrecked Jewish stores in a particularly harsh outburst. That same year Mississippi night riders burned Jewish farmhouses, and a Baltimore minister preached: 'Of all the dirty creatures who have befouled this earth, the Jew is the slimiest.

Considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next President, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk. —New York Times endorsement of me for President, September 2016

The leaflets show Axel’s picture, an image of the candidate surrounded by a handful of men in blue. The Houston Police Department endorsed him in the general, and there is every reason to assume it will back him again in the runoff against Sandy Wolcott, the D.A., who easily scored the endorsement of the Harris County sheriff. The battle of the law-and-order candidates has made for one of the oddest campaign seasons in Houston’s history.

Trump pointedly refused to condemn endorsements from a white supremacist and former KKK leader, but that can dissolve into hazy memory when he’s speaking with an African American pastor. George Orwell said seeing what’s in front of your nose demands a constant struggle. It’s also a constant struggle to recall what’s in the back of your mind.

Trump also found new ways to use old media as a substitute for party endorsements and traditional campaign spending. A “candidate with qualities uniquely tailored to the digital age,” Trump attracted free mainstream coverage by creating controversy.

Donald Trump has been endorsed by zero current or former U.S. presidents; zero Fortune 100 CEOs; and only one newspaper—the National Enquirer, aka Elvis Lives. All true. But Donald Trump doesn’t lose.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

Nature does not endorse things promoted by political propaganda or the underground criminal campaign. Such conspiracies do not overcome the truth and reality.

He endorsed the dollar as the basic currency, divided into smaller coins on a decimal basis. Because many Americans still bartered, Hamilton wanted to encourage the use of coins. As part of his campaign to foster a market economy, Hamilton suggested introducing a wide variety of coins, including gold and silver dollars, a ten-cent silver piece, and copper coins of a cent or half cent.

So there was good reason that very powerful potentates of the medical cartel were already targeting HCQ long before President Trump began his infamous romance with the malaria remedy. President Trump’s endorsement of HCQ on March 19, 20207 hyper-politicized the debate and gave Dr. Fauci’s defamation campaign against HCQ a soft landing among Democrats and the media. Trump’s critics relegated any further claims of HCQ efficacy to the same anti-science waste bin as Trump’s notorious recommendation for bleach to cure COVID and his denial of climate change. But HCQ had a long history of safe medical use that got lost in the politics and propaganda.

One reason Occupy got so much attention in the media at first--most of the seasoned activists I talked to agreed that we had never seen anything like it--was that so many more mainstream activist groups so quickly endorsed our cause. I am referring here particularly to those organizations that might be said to define the left wing of the Democratic Party: MoveOn.org, for example, or Rebuild the Dream. Such groups were enormously energized by the birth f Occupy. But, as I touched on above, most also seem to have assumed that the principled rejection of electoral politics and top-down forms of organization was simply a passing phase, the childhood of a movement that, they assumed, would mature into something resembling a left-wing Tea Party. From their perspective, the camps soon became a distraction. The real business of the movement would begin once Occupy became a conduit for guiding young activists into legislative campaigns, and eventually, get-out-the-vote drives for progressive candidates. It took some time for them to fully realize that the core of the movement was serious about its principles. It’s also fairly clear that when the camps were cleared, not only such groups, but the liberal establishment more generally, made a strategic decision to look the other way. From the perspective of the radicals, this was the ultimate betrayal. We had made our commitment to horizontal principles clear from the outset. They were the essence of what we were trying to do. But at the same time, we understood that there has always been a tacit understanding, in America, between radical groupes like ourselves, and their liberal allies. The radicals’ call for revolutionary change creates a fire to the liberals’ left that makes the liberals’ own proposals for reform seem a more reasonable alternative. We win them a place at the table. They keep us out of jail. In these terms, the liberal establishment utterly failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Occupy succeeded brilliantly in changing the national debate to begin addressing issues of financial power, the corruption of the political process, and social inequality, all to the benefit of the liberal establishment, which had struggled to gain traction around these issues. But when the Tasers, batons, and SWAT teams arrived, that establishment simply disappeared and left us to our fate. (p. 140-141)

Around 10:00 p.m. on that February 6, the Obama campaign informed its top contributors that the president would endorse super PAC Priorities USA Action, with the aim of benefitting from its fundraising capacity. In an email later that evening, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina wrote to supporters that given the financial dynamics apparent in the Republican primaries, something had to give: In 2011, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney raised $30 million from fewer than 200 contributors. Ninety six percent of what they’ve spent so far, more than $18 million, has been on attack ads. The main engine of Romney’s campaign has an average contribution of roughly $150,000. The stakes are too important to play by two different sets of rules. If we fail to act, we concede this election to a small group of powerful people intent on removing the president at any cost. (Thrush 2012) The age of the super PAC in presidential politics had begun. The emergence of super PACs represented a new era of American campaign finance. Prior to some groundbreaking federal court decisions in early 2010, almost all money that was funneled into the political system was subject to “hard money” limitations. That is, since the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002, anyone wishing to donate to a political committee (such as a campaign, PAC, or “527” organization) was constrained by campaign finance law.

move on up in the world of politics, you’ll make a substantial campaign contribution, publicly endorse me, and get your friends to do the same. Plus, you stop shaking down the gamblers, give Alexander’s

In Greek, the most significant area to which these curricula were reduced was the rudiments of Aristotelian logic. It is possible, for instance, to discern a major structural change in the medical curriculum in Alexandria toward the end of the sixth century, perhaps as a reaction to the decline of philosophical instruction in that last remaining center of Greek philosophical studies. ...The theological applications of philosophy in Greek patristic literature, by contrast, were many and longevous, though clearly harnessed to their theological, apologetic, and polemical goals rather than free philosophical discourse. In Syriac Christianity, as in Greek, there is a similar development of a logical curriculum, except that it was rather shorter: The Sasanian rulers actively endorsed a translation culture that viewed the transferral of Greek texts and ideas into Middle Persian as the “restitution” of an Iranian heritage that was allegedly pilfered by the Greeks after the campaigns of Alexander the Great.17 It was this cultural context, and the atmosphere of open debate fostered most energetically by Chosroes I Anushirwan (ruled 531–78), that must have prompted the Greek philosophers to seek refuge in his court after Justinian’s 529 edict prohibited them from teaching.

FAKE NEWS People say that heretofore I kept Black tenants from my door Using legal trickery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say that falsifying facts is How I skirted all my taxes. People call it larceny, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Constantly I’m found at fault, Charged with sexual assault, Harassment, and adultery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Starving students, people say, Had their futures ripped away By Dumpty University, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They smear me with the vilest things Like payoffs for my casual flings From the campaign treasury, But fake news doesn’t bother me. People say I monetize All my presidential ties, Boosting my prosperity, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say my meddling in Ukraine Left an ignominious stain Tantamount to treachery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say in days coronaviral I propelled our downward spiral Through my imbecility, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Notwithstanding crimes like these, I’ll continue as I please. Fake news doesn’t bother me. I’ll just rewrite history. Among other allegations, Donald Trump is said to have discriminated against African Americans as a New York real estate developer; committed tax fraud to avoid paying income tax on $50 million; engaged in sexual misconduct toward more than twenty-five women; endorsed Trump University’s fraudulent scheme to target the uneducated and the elderly; used the power of his office to attempt blackmail in Ukraine; and mishandled the government’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Anytime we could, we played basketball. Even the smallest town had a high school gym, and if there wasn’t time for a proper game, Reggie and I would still roll up our sleeves and get in a round of H-O-R-S-E while waiting for me to go onstage. Like any true athlete, he remained fiercely competitive. I sometimes woke up the day after a game of one-on-one barely able to walk, though I was too proud to let my discomfort show. Once we played a group of New Hampshire firefighters from whom I was trying to secure an endorsement. They were standard weekend warriors, a bit younger than me but in worse shape. After the first three times Reggie stole the ball down the floor and went in for thunderous dunks, I called a time-out. “What are you doing?” I asked. “What?” “You understand that I’m trying to get their support, right?” Reggie looked at me in disbelief. “You want us to lose to these stiffs?” I thought for a second. “Nah,” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far. Just keep it close enough that they’re not too pissed.” Spending time with Reggie, Marvin, and Gibbs, I found respite from the pressures of the campaign, a small sphere where I wasn’t a candidate or a symbol or a generational voice or even a boss, but rather just one of the guys. Which, as I slogged through those early months, felt more valuable than any pep talk. Gibbs did try to go the pep-talk route with me at one point as we were boarding another airplane at the end of another interminable day, after a particularly flat appearance. He told me that I needed to smile more, to remember that this was a great adventure and that voters loved a happy warrior. “Are you having any fun?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Anything we can do to make this more fun?” “No.” Sitting in the seat in front of us, Reggie overheard the conversation and turned back to look at me with a wide grin. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’m having the time of my life.” It was—although I didn’t tell him that at the time. —

When the Oakes brothers ran a defense campaign to stop election violence in South Africa in 1994, they helped to bring about the peaceful election of Nelson Mandela. As Alexander had shown me when I first visited the SCL offices, Mandela himself had endorsed SCL.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along the way the document specifically endorsed the disastrous Freedom to Farm Act, condemned agricultural price supports, and came out in favor of making soil conservation programs “voluntary,” perhaps out of nostalgia for the Dust Bowl days, when Kansans learned a healthy fear of the Almighty.17

Our partners often try to convince us that our opponents are so evil—and the moment is so urgent—that to question the group’s tactics or refuse to endorse its strategies is to do a great disservice to the cause. This is “ends justify the means” thinking that we as Christians cannot accept. Under no circumstances should Christians blindly follow our partners or overlook immorality and bad tactics or strategies for the sake of the movement.

deaf president now Most of you have probably seen the phrase, but what do you know about the “Deaf President Now” movement? Despite being the first Deaf university in the world, Gallaudet had never had a Deaf president before, and in March 1988 that was finally about to change. The Board of Trustees was slated to choose the next president from a list of three finalist candidates, two Deaf, one hearing. In the lead-up to the board meeting, students and faculty had been campaigning and rallying in support of a Deaf president. THE CANDIDATES DR. ELIZABETH ZINSER, hearing, Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of North Carolina DR. HARVEY CORSON, Deaf, Superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf DR. I. KING JORDAN, Deaf, Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at Gallaudet On March 6th, the board selected Zinser. No announcement was made. Students found out only after visiting the school’s PR office to extract the information. Students marched to the Mayflower hotel to confront the Board. Chair Jane Spilman defended the selection to the crowd, reportedly saying, “deaf people can’t function in the hearing world.” WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 7TH: Students hot-wire buses to barricade campus gates, only allowing certain people on campus. Students meet with Board, no concessions made. Protesters march to the Capitol. MARCH 8TH: Students burn effigies, form a 16-member council of students, faculty, and staff to organize the movement. THE FOUR DEMANDS: Zinser’s resignation and the selection of a Deaf president Resignation of Jane Spilman A 51% Deaf majority on the Board of Trustees No reprisals against protesters WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 9TH: Movement grows, gains widespread national support. Protest is featured on ABC’s Nightline. MARCH 10TH: Jordan, who’d previously conceded to Zinser’s appointment, joins the protests, saying “the four demands are justified.” Protests receive endorsements from national unions and politicians. DEAF PRESIDENT NOW! MARCH 10TH: Zinser resigns. MARCH 11TH: 2,500 march on Capitol Hill, bearing a banner that says “We still have a dream.” MARCH 13: Spilman resigns, Jordan is announced president. Protesters receive no punishments, DPN is hailed as a success and one of the precursors to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

During the mayoral race, I’d send Mike an email at 5 a.m. every day saying who that day’s endorsement was from and everything going on in the campaign that day: field, ads, polling, events, etc. Since Mike didn’t really like politics, he was happy to get my email, find out what he needed to know, and then go on with his day being mayor. Getting something that organized, that early in the morning also didn’t hurt his opinion of me: I came off as hardworking, organized, persistent, and thoughtful. Why not do the same thing at Tusk Strategies? We’d send our clients an email every morning at 7 a.m. listing what was happening in their campaign that day: every market, every issue, every tactic. Clients would wake up and see what was going on. The contrast between our proactivity and most consultants only doing what they’re asked after being asked a few times would be a benefit, plus it’d keep me and the client on the same page; we’d have an agenda for the day and it’d make it easier to get things done.*

To me, we had to infuse the subconscious of every reporter and every insider that Mike’s victory was so inevitable that predicting—or trying to bring about—anything else would only make them look foolish. This was a campaign where perception not only had to shape reality, it had to control it. That started with a plan that produced some derision but ultimately succeeded, especially with the reporters mocking us for it. It seemed a little crazy at the time: an endorsement every single day, seven days a week, from the day we launched the campaign in late March through Election Day. It didn’t matter who the endorser was: Sometimes it meant global figures like Al Gore, Colin Powell, or Bono, and sometimes it was hyperlocal organizations like the Korean Grocers Association. What mattered was that it never, ever stopped—that every single day, the big, bad, overwhelmingly powerful Bloomberg campaign machine was sweeping up support from every corner of the city.

Barack Obama endorsing a presidential candidate is reason enough not to vote for them.

Though the VP rollout would generally garner good headlines, the choice of Kaine infuriated Bernie supporters who had hoped Sanders’s campaign would force Hillary into picking a more liberal running mate. Kaine, an early endorser of then senator Barack Obama in 2007 and later a chairman of the DNC and governor and senator from Virginia, reflected Hillary’s comfort with the business community and free trade. He had campaigned in Virginia as an opponent of abortion but had since made clear that he would support abortion rights in office. The movement of Hillary toward Kaine, and the inability of Bernie’s supporters to get everything they wanted in the party’s platform, did nothing to take the focus off Wasserman Schultz, who suddenly became the most visible and vulnerable target for their outrage.

The lesson for Sanders in 2016 was clear: For every Democratic politician who endorsed Hillary and for every major donor who wrote her checks, there was a debt to be paid. Bernie could run without that baggage. Beholden only to his supporters, he could be more agile and more pure than Hillary. He could be like Obama.

One might win battles and even campaigns with Sun Tzu, but it is difficult to win a war by following his principles. The reason for this is that Sun Tzu was never interested in shaping the political conditions, because he lived in an era of seemingly never-ending civil wars. The only imperative for him was to survive while paying the lowest possible price and avoiding fighting, because even a successful battle against one foe might leave one weaker when the moment came to fight the next one. Mark McNeilly emphasizes the advantages of following a strategy based on Sun Tzu’s principles for modern warfare. As always in history, if one wishes to highlight the differences to Clausewitz, the similarities between the two approaches are neglected. For example, the approach in Sun Tzu’s chapter about ‘Moving Swiftly to Overcome Resistance’ would be quite similar to one endorsed by Clausewitz and was practised by Napoleon.

That image says a lot about the moment we’re in. There’s plenty of American agreement, and not just on immigration. A 2021 survey of more than eighty thousand people identified nearly 150 issues on which Republicans and Democrats agreed. Several were endorsed by more than two-thirds of both parties. These included overturning Citizens United so that companies could not fund political campaigns, giving immigrants who arrived in the US as children a path to citizenship, and tax incentives to promote clean energy. And yet, in our imagination, shared values have eroded into tiny islands, barely visible above the waves.

In the mid-1950s, Tata endorsed the political philosophy of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) who had quit the Congress party to establish the Swatantra party. The new party espoused the model of economic growth that some Southeast Asian countries were rapidly adopting. When Rajaji campaigned for the Swatantra party in South Kanara during the 1960s, Tata travelled with him, interpreting his speeches in Kannada for the voters. When Tata was campaigning for the Swatantra party in the 1962 general elections, Amma was canvassing votes for the Jan Sangh, mainly because many of her good friends supported that party. Tata's attitude towards the Jan Sangh, which also endorsed the free enterprise-based economy, was more lukewarm. Tata liked the dedication and discipline of its RSS cadres and the personal honesty and integrity of its early leaders. But being an atheist, Tata could never be wholly enthusiastic about Jan Sangh's version of god's own truth.