Campaign Promises Quotes

If he decided to pursue Sienna...Sucking in a breath Indigo promised herself she'd warn the girl if and when the time came-because no woman should have to face that campaign unprepared.

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.

politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

There must be a lot of duplication in our country’s laws," said Dukhi. "Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws." "For politicians, passing laws is like passing water," said Narayan. "It all ends down the drain.

Putin had told Yeltsin that he did not like election campaigns, and now he dismissed campaign promises as unachievable lies told by politicians and denigrated television advertisements as unseemly manipulation of gullible consumers.

As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they would be trusting enough to be led out again. He urged them, in other words, to do their own thinking.

Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.

For my mother, the world was full of opportunities for moral instruction. But I never knew her to get involved in a political campaign. Like my grandparents, she was suspicious of platforms, doctrines, absolutes, preferring to express her values on a smaller canvas.

She said, "Promise me that you will not tell me anything of the plans formed for the campaign against the Count. Not by word, or inference, or implication, not at any time whilst this remains to me!

In the midst of all of this local peace and harmony, a man named Ronald John was now the President-elect of the United States. He campaigned on a platform that promised to “rid America of the Muslim scourge.” What does this mean? Arya pondered. Does this man seriously intend to engage in the process of deporting all Muslims, whether here legally or illegally, whether citizens or non-citizens? Isn’t that unconstitutional? Arya Khan was inspirited and . . . terrified.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

Most politicians are corrupt as they do not represent the masses that voted for them, but rather they choose to return numerous favors to the corporations that funded their election campaigns.

It never really ends... Children surviving through the cold winds of neglect, and all kinds of misfortune and vile treatment.We see them everyday, with broken smiles that endure the painful kicking of their malnourished bellies protruded with dreams that may never see the light of conception... But with just a little kind word, A handful of promise, A heart of compassion, A smile full of hope, We would hold hands together in helping them conceive their dreams... Because they are the little bits and pieces that make us whole...

Later, when they sat down and went over the figures closely, they found an interesting pattern. Adamowski had received fifty-one percent of the votes, cast by white persons. But the enormous black vote had given Daley his victory. The people who were trapped in the ghetto slums and the nightmarish public housing projects, the people who had the worst school system and were most often degraded by the Police Department, the people who received the fewest campaign promises and who were ignored as part of the campaign trail, had given him his third term. They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got.

For candidates to achieve any high office in our state or federal legislature, they are required to make loud, ambitious public promises during their campaigns, which can never be completely fulfilled, even by the greatest humanitarian intentions. Therefore, we’re starting off our relationship with each prospective leader on the wrong foot, a foot of mistrust.

My involvement must be kept secret, no matter what, Rollie. Even if it backfires and you face prison or worse. Got it?” “You may count on me, Mr. President, as long as you promise to remember, you have the power to pardon criminals.” “Yes, I do, don’t I?” RonJohn snickers. “I almost forgot about my convenient little presidential power.” “We’ll see that the campaign gets a fresh and ample supply of cash. God bless the Supreme Court and Citizens United

And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It’s all generated from the very beginning (maybe—this is a simple analysis). It’s all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying

By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four. If there was an exception to some statement I just made, I wouldn’t just point it out; I’d provide footnotes. “You’re burying the lede!” Axe would practically shout after listening to me drone on and on and on. For a day or two I’d obediently focus on brevity, only to suddenly find myself unable to resist a ten-minute explanation of the nuances of trade policy or the pace of Arctic melting. “What d’ya think?” I’d say, pleased with my thoroughness as I walked offstage. “You got an A on the quiz,” Axe would reply. “No votes, though.

For the next few minutes, Edith led the room in hollering “Fired up! Ready to go!” back and forth, again and again. I was confused at first, but figured it would be impolite of me not to join in. And pretty soon, I started to feel kinda fired up! I started to feel like I was ready to go! I noticed everybody at the meeting suddenly was smiling too, and after the chanting was done we settled down and talked for the next hour about the community and the country and what we could do to make it better. Even after I left Greenwood, for the rest of the day, every so often, I’d point to someone on my staff and ask, “You fired up?” Eventually it became a campaign rallying cry. And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn’t be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign—and by extension a democracy—proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

Bill Clinton also benefited from a friendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.)

The White House elected to power in November 2008 campaigned on compelling promises of hope, change, and bringing the nation together. The reality it delivered for eight years was rather different: a brand of leadership that was narcissistic, aggressively secular, ideologically divisive, resistant to compromise, unwilling to accept responsibility for its failures, and generous in spreading blame. As

As my wife saw it—as most people would see it, I imagine—an unwritten book was hardly a financial plan. “In other words,” she said, “you’ve got some magic beans in your pocket. That’s what you’re telling me. You have some magic beans, and you’re going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you’ll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?” “Something like that,” I said. Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn’t. “This is it, Barack,” Michelle said. “One last time. But don’t expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.” — AS A KID, I had sometimes watched as my salesman grandfather tried to sell life insurance policies over the phone, his face registering misery as he made cold calls in the evening from our tenth-floor apartment in a Honolulu high-rise. During the early months of 2003, I found myself thinking of him often as I sat at my desk in the sparsely furnished headquarters of my newly launched Senate campaign

Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.

I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.

Campaigns are no place for candidates who think they walk on water.

Once they’d sorted out the hundred ‘instructions,’ the population came to believe, as they did in God, that the Krugal campaign was handing out free money.

When Seagull droppings landed on my head at a campaign event, I chose to read it as a sign of a coming success.

Just yesterday, a leader from yesterday began a campaign for president by promising to take us back to yesterday. Yesterday is over and we’re never going back. - Senator Marco Rubio

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country? And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.

In the same way, the establishment US media painted America as a decaying, racist, predatory capitalist realm unable to provide medical care for the poor, rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race,”5 and promised all this could be changed by redistributing the country’s wealth. That also was a disinformation campaign.

Promise me.” “No.” Etan’s eyes were glassy with tears. “Coward. If I were dying, you’d promise me. Because you wouldn’t have to answer to me then. But I’m not dying, and you won’t promise it. Bloody coward.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

He considered getting up to check the color of the bong he’d be using but decided that obsessive checking and convulsive movements could compromise the atmosphere of casual calm he needed to maintain while he waited, protruding but not moving, for the woman he’d met at a design session for his agency’s small campaign for her small theater company’s new Wedekind festival, while he waited for this woman, with whom he’d had intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise.

He hated the games politicians played, the backroom deals, and how the powerful played with the lives of the innocent like they were worthless. He hated how the corrupt hid behind veils of media spin, how the rich influenced decisions with the promise of campaign donations, and how the players made a mockery of moral decision-making. He did his best to avoid it, he did his best to steer clear, however, in his world, the world of law and justice, politics was an inevitable dilemma.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes--since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a year.

Toot showed me how to balance a checkbook and resist buying stuff I didn’t need. She was the reason why, even in my most revolutionary moments as a young man, I could admire a well-run business and read the financial pages, and why I felt compelled to disregard overly broad claims about the need to tear things up and remake society from whole cloth. She taught me the value of working hard and doing your best even when the work was unpleasant, and about fulfilling your responsibilities even when doing so was inconvenient. She taught me to marry passion with reason, to not get overly excited when life was going well, and to not get too down when it went badly. All this was instilled in me by an elderly, plainspoken white lady from Kansas. It was her perspective that often came to mind when I was campaigning, and her worldview that I sensed in many of the voters I encountered, whether in rural Iowa or in a Black neighborhood in Chicago, that same quiet pride in sacrifices made for children and grandchildren, the same lack of pretension, the same modesty of expectations.

Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I’d never been asked about during the campaign. “Pirates?” “Pirates, Mr. President,” Jones said. “Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.

Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves? Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do? Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people? Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely? Here’s why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere. When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities. Childhood stories promise us that girls who dare to leave the path or explore get attacked by big bad wolves and pricked by deadly spindles, so we learn to not trust our curiosity. The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in. Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger. Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been. The legal system proves to us again and again that even our own memories and experiences will not be trusted. If twenty women come forward and say, “He did it,” and he says, “No, I didn’t,” they will believe him while discounting and maligning us every damn time. And religion, sweet Jesus. The lesson of Adam and Eve—the first formative story I was told about God and a woman—was this: When a woman wants more, she defies God, betrays her partner, curses her family, and destroys the world. We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.

In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.)

Despite an unimpressive first term in office, which featured huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tax increases for everyone else, Reagan was reelected in 1984 in an unprecedented landslide, winning forty-nine of the fifty states against hapless Democrat Walter Mondale. While he has become the patron saint of all Republicans, especially those who revel in wearing the “conservative” mantle, Reagan’s record is far, far removed from his rhetoric. Despite this, the collective delusion of his supporters is best exemplified by noted Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s claims, regarding his 1980 campaign promises, that they were “Done, done, done, done, done, done and done. Every bit of it.

In the age of the permanent campaign, politicians plan only as far as their next bid for election. They invoke children and grandchildren in public speeches, but electoral cycles of two to seven years determine which issues prevail. The result is less money for crumbling infrastructure and schools and more for any initiative that promises jobs right now.

Their concerns seemed realized just a week later, when Trump continued the process of destabilizing the government to push an authoritarian agenda. At 4:42 p.m. on January 27, the administration announced a travel ban on people coming from primarily Muslim countries. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power. It also stopped the admission of refugees for 120 days and suspended the Syrian refugee program.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip’s humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes—since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and,

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

President Carter’s re-election campaign in 1979 commenced amid spiralling global oil prices. With Bandar’s help, Carter drafted a letter to Fahd requesting Saudi Arabia to put more oil on the market.69 Fahd responded: ‘Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.’70 He promised to do ‘anything in his power externally or internally to ensure your re-election’, since this was ‘essential if there was ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’.71 This assistance, which saw Saudi oil trading $4–5 a day below other suppliers, cost the kingdom $30m to $40m a day. In gratitude, Carter invited Bandar to the White House in early December 1979, where they discussed Middle East politics and the US–Saudi relationship.

McConnell seemed an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform. Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

The politicians were in full bay, particularly those of his own party who had been urging, without success, his support of antislavery legislation which he feared would lose him the border states, held to the Union so far by his promise that no such laws would be passed. It also seemed to these Republicans that entirely too many Democrats were seated in high places, specifically in the cabinet and the army; and now their anger was increased by apprehension. About to open their campaigns for reëlection in November, they had counted on battlefield victories to increase their prospects for victory at the polls. Instead, the main eastern army, under the Democrat McClellan—“McNapoleon,” they called him—had held back, as if on purpose, and then retreated to the James, complaining within hearing of the voters that the Administration was to blame. Privately, many of the Jacobins agreed with the charge, though for different reasons, the main one being that Lincoln, irresolute by nature, had surrounded himself with weak-spined members of the opposition party. Fessenden of Maine put it plainest: “The simple truth is, there was never such a shambling half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government since the world began.

I’d put forward what I considered to be clear positions on all these issues during the campaign. But that had been from the cheap seats, before I had hundreds of thousands of troops and a sprawling national security infrastructure under my command. Any terrorist attack would now happen on my watch. Any American lives lost or compromised, at home or abroad, would weigh uniquely on my conscience. These were my wars now.

Just ask the Iraqi Kurds and the Shia of the South. When the Kurds responded to US provocations, leaflet campaigns, and promises by rising up against Saddam in 1991, Bush Senior let them be slaughtered. I was in touch, occasionally, with someone in the DIA who’d taken part in getting the Kurds to rise up, and asked him how he could live with himself after that. He shrugged and said, “They’re just animals.” Which made me sick, actually.

The inspiration our campaign was providing, the sight of so many young people newly invested in their ability to make change, the bringing together of Americans across racial and socio-economic lines - it was the realization of everything I’d once dreamed might be possible in politics, and it made me proud. But the continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me”.

Well, I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve recently acquired a very promising new author who specialises in high-concept science fiction. And it got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and everything, and there were some wonderful pull quotes and the one we decided to run with especially recommended it to fans of another, more famous author of high-concept science fiction. So we put it on all the posters and there’s big campaign all over the Underground and it’s on the front of the book and it’s too late to change any of it.” Oliver was looking perplexed in a way that made me want to hug him. “That seems unalloyedly positive, Bridget.” “It would be.” She threw herself into the nearest free chair. “Except the more famous author in question was Philip K. Dick. And the pull quote was, ‘If you like Dick, you’ll love this.’ And no one spotted it until we started getting extremely disappointed reviews on Amazon.

Since the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, wrote Remnick, the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence . . . he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view.35

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

I have this feeling that whoever’s elected president, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail — blah, blah, blah — when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down ... and it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll ... and then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, ‘Any questions?’” “Just what my agenda is.” — Bill Hicks

The answer was, we weren’t at all ready. Annual flu shots didn’t provide protection against H1N1, it turned out, and because vaccines generally weren’t a moneymaker for drug companies, the few U.S. vaccine makers that existed had a limited capacity to ramp up production of a new one. Then we faced questions of how to distribute antiviral medicines, what guidelines hospitals used in treating cases of the flu, and even how we’d handle the possibility of closing schools and imposing quarantines if things got significantly worse. Several veterans of the Ford administration’s 1976 swine flu response team warned us of the difficulties involved in getting out in front of an outbreak without overreacting or triggering a panic: Apparently President Ford, wanting to act decisively in the middle of a reelection campaign, had fast-tracked mandatory vaccinations before the severity of the pandemic had been determined, with the result that more Americans developed a neurological disorder connected to the vaccine than died from the flu. “You need to be involved, Mr. President,” one of Ford’s staffers advised, “but you need to let the experts run the process.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren” can dissuade me from voting for Trump, a woman told Ashley Parker of the New York Times. So imagine how you would feel if every time you turned on NBC, you saw my reporting on this figure you love—this figure you think will lift you up, save your job, make your country great again. Imagine how you’d feel if every night and all day this little blond-haired girl was shining a critical light on your beloved figure. Who is she to question his plans? Double-check his statements? Follow up on his promises? You would hate me. And people do.

According to the Pulitzer-winning PolitiFact (a left-tilting website that’s clearly no admirer of Trump), President Trump has kept the following campaign promises: He promised to take no salary—promise kept. He promised to create a twenty-four-hour White House hotline for veterans—promise kept. He promised to slash federal regulations—promise kept. He promised to ban White House officials from ever lobbying for a foreign nation—promise kept. He promised to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia from a list of conservative, strict constructionist judges—promise kept. Trump promised to keep the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center open—promise kept. He promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—promise kept. He promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord—promise kept. He promised to persuade NATO nations to contribute more for their common defense—promise kept. He promised to halt emigration to America from unstable, terrorist-ridden nations—promise kept. And on and on, one campaign promise after another, kept by President Trump and checked off by PolitiFact.184 This isn’t the record of someone who aspires to be a dictator; it’s the record of a democratic politician who keeps his word.

As for the world beyond my family—well, what they would see for most of my teenage years was not a budding leader but rather a lackadaisical student, a passionate basketball player of limited talent, and an incessant, dedicated partyer. No student government for me; no Eagle Scouts or interning at the local congressman’s office. Through high school, my friends and I didn’t discuss much beyond sports, girls, music, and plans for getting loaded. Three of these guys—Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme, and Mike Ramos—remain some of my closest friends. To this day, we can laugh for hours over stories of our misspent youth. In later years, they would throw themselves into my campaigns with a loyalty for which I will always be grateful, becoming as skilled at defending my record as anyone on MSNBC. But there were also times during my presidency—after they had watched me speak to a big crowd, say, or receive a series of crisp salutes from young Marines during a base tour—when their faces would betray a certain bafflement, as if they were trying to reconcile the graying man in a suit and tie with the ill-defined man-child they’d once known. That guy? they must have said to themselves. How the hell did that happen? And if my friends had ever asked me directly, I’m not sure I’d have had a good answer.

...the campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short -term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he’d create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an “essential precursor” of the prosperity of the nineties , and that The Market, in its infinite, time -spanning wisdom, would choose / had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.

In a memoir of her tenure as secretary of state, published in June 2014, Hillary Clinton gave her most detailed account of her actions to date. She denounced what she called “misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit” about the attacks, and wrote that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya.” She wrote: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow. As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.” Addressing the controversy over what triggered the attack, and whether the administration misled the public, she maintained that the Innocence of Muslims video had played a role, though to what extent wasn’t clear. “There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.” Clinton’s account was greeted with praise and condemnation in equal measure. As Clinton promoted her book, a new investigation was being launched by the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. Chaired by former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, the committee’s creation promised to drive questions about Benghazi into the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom’ of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both

My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state. “Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.” The room would be quiet, and I’d take a few questions. When a meeting was over, people lined up to shake my hand, pick up some campaign literature, or talk to Jeremiah, Anita, or a local campaign volunteer about how they could get involved. And I’d drive on to the next town, knowing that the story I was telling was true; convinced that this campaign was no longer about me and that I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another. —

Even if one were to agree with progressive Christians that racial inequities should be the Church’s greatest concern, no other race-based injustice can compare to what is being done under the auspices of “reproductive rights,” something Professor Carl Trueman ably highlighted in First Things. “Police actions in 2018 accounted for the deaths of fewer than three hundred African Americans, while in the same year abortions of African-American babies accounted for more than 117,000 of the same,” he pointed out. “One would think this extreme difference (390 to one) would make abortion the centerpiece of Christian critiques of racism.”67 The only reason it wouldn’t is if those drawing such equivalencies do not, deep down, see those 117,000 babies as equally human as the 300 adults. Prior, French, Keller, and both Moores have taken to the pages of the most elite media outlets in the world to incessantly disparage average Christians who felt it was worth voting for Donald Trump for a chance to dismantle the most wicked practice this nation has ever known. Let’s be clear, no one cast a ballot for Trump because he committed adultery or because he bragged in 2005 about grabbing women’s private parts. Nor was the legal protection of adultery or lechery a feature of the Trump campaign’s platform. In contrast, Clinton and Biden did promise voters that electing them would allow the butchery to continue. They did make it a part of their platforms, and a significant number of voters cast ballots for them based on those promises. Given this, which vote is more morally compromising for the Christian—the one that places power in the hands of those who promise to allow the innocent to be put to death or the one that vests power in those who promise to make a way to rescue the innocent? Which group of Christians do these celebrated evangelical leaders accuse of defaming the name of Christ with an untoward interest in political power, and which do they excuse and even promote?

For all the style and excitement of the new team, and all the great promise, 1961 was a terrible year for the Kennedy Administration. The young President had arrived in the White House with a far slimmer margin of victory than he hoped, a mere 100,000 votes. It was not one of the great mandates, rather a margin which seemed to strengthen his enemies more than his friends, and the mandate of getting America moving again was questionable. America might move at his demand, but in which direction? And in what way could he move it? By building more and heavier missiles? Turning around an irrational policy on China? Bringing the nation together by accelerating long-neglected commitments to American Negroes? His nomination, his campaign, his election had meant many things to many people; now they waited, and many would find themselves disappointed in that first year. He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people.

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His 'color-blind' rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd 'I believe in states' rights,' and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar - arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language.

the Wilmington coup of 1898 was even mentioned— If the Wilmington massacre of 1898 was even mentioned— (how would the massacred name it?) If the Campaign for White Supremacy leading up to the 1898 elections was even mentioned in the junior-year class on the history of North Carolina, the events were described as another eruption of Negro dissatisfaction which, once expressed, quieted. But in the story of the campaign (for white supremacy), the Negro had become unruly, needed instead to be ruled once more out, “Negro rule” ousted into the swampy fantastic as fear, as specter, as a promise. The phantasm of Negro rule was what the high school textbook never acknowledged had rallied the Wilmington race (war) of 1898, the riot planned and instigated, orderly disorder, the wrong the Redeemers sought to riot up, right justifying anything, even murder, the declaration to “choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses” of whatever the Negro populating their fantasies was—threatening and promising domination, threatening revenge, promising a North Carolina governed by the many not the few. A thousand Black rapists (each vote a thousand more) haunted the campaign the Redeemers rallied to wage. They claimed the fight to protect their honor. For, if this time they didn’t prevail, who could imagine what they would be subject to?

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

Maria managed to avoid Oliver for most of St. Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t difficult-apparently he spent half of it sleeping off his wild night. Not that she cared one bit. She’d learned her lesson with him. Truly she had. Not even the beautiful bouquet of irises he’d sent up to her room midafternoon changed that. Now that she was dressing for tonight’s ball, she was rather proud of herself for having only thought of him half a dozen times. Per hour, her conscience added. “There, that’s the last one,” Betty said as she tucked another ostrich feather into Maria’s elaborate coiffure. According to Celia, the new fashion this year involved a multitude of feathers drooping from one’s head in languid repose. Maria hoped hers didn’t decide to find their repose on the floor. Betty seemed to have used a magical incantation to keep them in place, and Maria wasn’t at all sure they would stay put. “You look lovely, miss,” Betty added. “If I do,” Maria said, “it’s only because of your efforts, Betty.” Betty ducked her head to hide her blush. “Thank you, miss.” It was amazing how different the servant had been ever since Maria had taken Oliver’s advice to heart, letting the girl fuss over her and tidy her room and do myriad things that Maria would have been perfectly happy to do for herself. But he’d proved to be right-Betty practically glowed with pride. Maria wished she’d known sooner how to treat them all, but honestly, how could she have guessed that these mad English would enjoy being in service? It boggled her democratic American mind. Casting an admiring glance down Maria’s gown of ivory satin, Betty said, “I daresay his lordship will swallow his tongue when he sees you tonight.” “If he does, I hope he chokes on it,” Maria muttered. With a sly glance, Betty fluffed out the bouffant drapery of white tulle that crossed Maria’s bust and was fastened in the center with an ornament of gold mosaic. “John says the master didn’t touch a one of those tarts at the brothel last night. He says that his lordship refused every female that the owner of the place brought before him.” “I somehow doubt that.” Paying her no heed, Betty continued her campaign to salvage her master’s dubious honor. “Then Lord Stoneville went to the opera house and left without a single dancer on his arm. John says he never done that before.” Maria rolled her eyes, though a part of her desperately wanted to believe it was true-a tiny, silly part of her that she would have to slap senseless. Betty polished the ornament with the edge of her sleeve. “John says he drank himself into a stupor, then came home without so much as kissing a single lady. John says-“ “John is inventing stories to excuse his master’s actions.” “Oh no, miss! John would never lie. And I can promise you that the master has never come home so early before, and certainly not without…that is, at the house in Acton he was wont to bring a tart or two home to…well, you know.” “Help him choke on his tongue?” Maria snapped as she picked up her fan. Betty laughed. “Now that would be a sight, wouldn’t it? Two ladies trying to shove his tongue down his throat.” “I’d pay them well to do it.

Most of the mortgaged farmers. Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three years and four and five. Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief. Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine. Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus. Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it. The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of L. Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled governmental jobs. The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying. Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their credit. These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and October.

She drops the singsong thing. “I do go to school, Krissy. I didn’t quit.” Ow. “You know what I think? I think you’re under a lot of pressure, with a baby coming and making your first record. Maybe it makes you want to go back to a time before you had all these stresses in your life.” She is blowing me off. “So you’re a psychology major after all.” She doesn’t laugh. “I’m going to give you some advice now.” No shit. “Don’t ever run away from your commitments. You’ll have more options open to you if you don’t run away. Does that make sense?” I say nothing. I shouldn’t have said that I ran away. I should have put it differently. ‘I’ve come to a decision’ or something dramatical like that. Then she’d be on my side, welcoming me back, not lecturing me. “We all have a snake,” Betty continues, and right now you need to -“ “What?” It’s like she slapped me. “I said we all have a snake and yours is -“ “We all have a what?” My head’s pounding along with my heart. “I don’t mean it literally. I’m just trying to say that if you don’t face -“ “Did you say we all have snakes? Why did you say that?” She sighs. “Krissy, if you’d let me finish, I could tell you.” I sit, stunned. I never told her about the snake. “I have a snake and you have a snake. We all have to face our demons some day, sweetheart, and that day’ll be the scariest you ever lived. Then you’ll wake up the next morning and realise your snake is still there, that you have to face your demons again. But it won’t be so scary this time. Once you see your shadow, you’ll realise that the rest of your life will be spent staring it down, but you know what?” “What?” “You can do it.” “Yeah. Thanks, Betty.” Christ. “Krissy, you have a calling, so make this record. If you hate it, you never have to make another record again.” She doesn’t understand. I slide to the floor. The [university student campaign] issue girls turn around to stare at me, their clipboards at their sides. “Promise?” I ask. “I promise,” says Betty. “If this record’s as bad as you think it is,” she says cheerfully, “you won’t be allowed to make another one!

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why if all politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes? You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does. One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices — 545 human beings out of 235 million — are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excused the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered by private central bank. I exclude all of the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislators’ responsibility to determine how he votes. Don’t you see the con game that is played on the people by the politicians? Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party. What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of Tip O’Neill, who stood up and criticized Ronald Reagan for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating appropriations and taxes. Those 545 people and they alone are responsible. They and they alone should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses — provided they have the gumption to manage their own employees.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

At this battle, as in all the other battles, however, no actual fighting occurs! As noted above, we learn the fate of the enemies of God, but this is more of a battle summary or report of casualties (e.g. Rev 19:20–21). To repeat: there is no actual final battle in Revelation. Why? Because the images of battle are supposed to suggest to us the promise and reality of God’s defeat of evil, but they are not the means of that defeat. There is no literal battle, no literal war of the Lamb for those present at the second coming to join in (as the “Left Behind” series imagines it), no literal pre-Parousia campaign conducted by human soldiers, Christian or otherwise, on behalf of God. “[I]n the cataclysmic battle of Revelation 19, what do the heavenly armies do? Nothing. . . . All the actions belong to Christ,”33 and his only weapon is the “sword” of his word.

While previous Republican presidential candidates engaged in campaign outreach to televangelists in the hopes of garnering the votes of their significant audiences, Trump is the first to act like one—making up facts, promising magical success, pretending to solve complex problems with a tweet or an impetuous boast.

Spending more time online, sometimes with complete strangers, has made people more susceptible to disinformation campaigns that play to their likes, desires, and sometimes their prejudices, with real-world consequences.

Crime and welfare were the major themes of Reagan’s campaign rhetoric. According to the Edsalls, one of Reagan’s favorite and most-often-repeated anecdotes was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax-free income alone is over $150,000.”68 The term welfare queen became a not-so-subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”69 These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it. Reagan portrayed the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”70 Reagan’s racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22 percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Reagan. The defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”71

Less amusing was an interview in which Billy Shaheen, the co-chair of Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire, suggested to a reporter that my self-disclosed prior drug use would prove fatal in a matchup against the Republican nominee. I didn’t consider the general question of my youthful indiscretions out of bounds, but Shaheen went a bit further, implying that perhaps I had dealt drugs as well. The interview set off a furor, and Shaheen quickly resigned from his post. All this happened just ahead of our final debate in Iowa. That morning, both Hillary and I were in Washington for a Senate vote. When my team and I got to the airport for the flight to Des Moines, Hillary’s chartered plane turned out to be parked right next to ours. Before takeoff, Huma Abedin, Hillary’s aide, found Reggie and let him know that the senator was hoping to speak to me. I met Hillary on the tarmac, Reggie and Huma hovering a few paces away. Hillary apologized for Shaheen. I thanked her and then suggested we both do a better job of reining in our surrogates. At this, Hillary got agitated, her voice sharpening as she claimed that my team was routinely engaging in unfair attacks, distortions, and underhanded tactics. My efforts at lowering the temperature were unsuccessful, and the conversation ended abruptly, with her still visibly angry as she boarded her plane.

At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams. I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.

The second bomber went after a Tennessee Republican state senator who’d voted down the Medicare expansion, despite his campaign promise to make sure that “every Tennessean who wants insurance will get insurance.

went home, called election lawyers, and delivered the lists as promised. When Bush’s lead was down to a mere 537 votes out of about six million cast, the reexamination of ballots was stopped. Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, also the co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, declared Bush the winner. Calls for a recount were deafening, and supported by the Florida Supreme Court. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no uniform recount standard to meet the equal protection clause, and no time to create one. Therefore, the recount was stopped. It

It was as if nobody had been listening to the campaign promises I’d made—or as if they assumed that I hadn’t actually meant what I’d said. The response to my speech gave me an early preview of what would become a running criticism during my first two years in office: that I was trying to do too much, that to aspire to anything more than a return to the pre-crisis status quo, to treat change as more than a slogan, was naïve and irresponsible at best, and at worst a threat to America.

I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies and on through the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

during LBJ’s Great Society campaign, when a universal single-payer program partially funded by payroll tax revenue was introduced for seniors (Medicare) and a not-so-comprehensive program based on a combination of federal and state funding was set up for the poor (Medicaid). During the 1970s and early 1980s, this patchwork system functioned well enough, with roughly 80 percent of Americans covered through either their jobs or one of these two programs. Meanwhile, defenders of the status quo could point to the many innovations brought to market by the for-profit medical industry, from MRIs to lifesaving drugs.

Moderate Republicans like Rockefeller supported the national consensus toward advancing civil rights by promoting national legislation to protect the vote, employment, housing and other elements of the American promise denied to blacks. They sought to contain Communism, not eradicate it, and they had faith that the government could be a force for good if it were circumscribed and run efficiently. They believed in experts and belittled the Goldwater approach, which held that complex problems could be solved merely by the application of common sense. It was not a plus to the Rockefeller camp that Goldwater had publicly admitted, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”174 Politically, moderates believed that these positions would also preserve the Republican Party in a changing America. Conservatives wanted to restrict government from meddling in private enterprise and the free exercise of liberty. They thought bipartisanship and compromise were leading to collectivism and fiscal irresponsibility. On national security, Goldwater and his allies felt Eisenhower had been barely fighting the communists, and that the Soviets were gobbling up territory across the globe. At one point, Goldwater appeared to muse about dropping a low-yield nuclear bomb on the Chinese supply lines in Vietnam, though it may have been more a press misunderstanding than his actual view.175 Conservatives believed that by promoting these ideas, they were not just saving a party, they were rescuing the American experiment. Politically, they saw in Goldwater a chance to break the stranglehold of the Eastern moneyed interests. If a candidate could raise money and build an organization without being beholden to the Eastern power brokers, then such a candidate could finally represent the interests of authentic Americans, the silent majority that made the country an exceptional one. Goldwater looked like the leader of a party that was moving west. His head seemed fashioned from sandstone. An Air Force pilot, his skin was taut, as though he’d always left the window open on his plane. He would not be mistaken for an East Coast banker. The likely nominee disagreed most violently with moderates over the issue of federal protections for the rights of black Americans. In June, a month before the convention, the Senate had voted on the Civil Rights Act. Twenty-seven of thirty-three Republicans voted for the legislation. Goldwater was one of the six who did not, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. “The structure of the federal system, with its fifty separate state units, has long permitted this nation to nourish local differences, even local cultures,” said Goldwater. Though Goldwater had voted for previous civil rights legislation and had founded the Arizona Air National Guard as a racially integrated unit, moderates rejected his reasoning. They said it was a disguise to cover his political appeal to anxious white voters whom he needed to win the primaries. He was courting not just Southern whites but whites in the North and the Midwest who were worried about the speed of change in America and competition from newly empowered blacks.

She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America,” I said. “They’re not famous. Their names aren’t in the newspapers. But each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren. They aren’t seeking the limelight—all they try to do is just do the right thing. “And in this crowd, there are a lot of quiet heroes like that—mothers and fathers, grandparents, who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children and maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did. “That’s what America’s about. That’s what we’re fighting for.” It was as good a closing argument for the campaign as I felt that I could give.—

By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four. If there was an exception to some statement I just made, I wouldn’t just point it out; I’d provide footnotes.

What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing? What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing - Things to do for Self Development: Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills. This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully. Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below - Process of Introducing Yourself: 1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself. 2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work. 3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work. 4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters. Showing Professionalism: How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are: 1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration. 2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job. 3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work. Win the Client's Heart: There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind. Mistakes to Avoid: Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes. The Mistakes are: 1. Failure to identify oneself. 2. Show Engagement. 3. Lack of communication with the client etc. Being Punctual: It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time. So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.

amicable relationship with the government started in 1922, when President Warren G. Harding summoned me and other businessmen to the White House to help him fulfill his campaign promise to bring prosperity to our people by putting “America First.

From the moment he’d been elected Speaker in January, John Boehner had insisted that House Republicans had every intention of following through on their campaign pledge to end what he called my “job-crushing spending binge of the last two years.

The Tea Party also resurrected and poured gas on an old rumor from the campaign: that not only was I Muslim, but I’d actually been born in Kenya and was therefore constitutionally barred from serving as president. By September, the question of how much nativism and racism explained the Tea Party’s rise had become a major topic of debate on the cable shows—especially after former president and lifelong southerner Jimmy Carter offered up the opinion that the extreme vitriol directed toward me was at least in part spawned by racist views. At the White House, we made a point of not commenting on any of this—and not just because Axe had reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race.

This was clear less than thirty minutes into the speech, when—as I debunked the phony claim that the bill would insure undocumented immigrants—a relatively obscure five-term Republican congressman from South Carolina named Joe Wilson leaned forward in his seat, pointed in my direction, and shouted, his face flushed with fury, “You lie!” For the briefest second, a stunned silence fell over the chamber. I turned to look for the heckler (as did Speaker Pelosi and Joe Biden, Nancy aghast and Joe shaking his head). I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head. Instead, I simply responded by saying “It’s not true” and then carried on with my speech as Democrats hurled boos in Wilson’s direction. As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before a joint session address—at least not in modern times. Congressional criticism was swift and bipartisan, and by the next morning Wilson had apologized publicly for the breach of decorum, calling Rahm and asking that his regrets get passed on to me as well. I downplayed the matter, telling a reporter that I appreciated the apology and was a big believer that we all make mistakes. And yet I couldn’t help noticing the news reports saying that online contributions to Wilson’s reelection campaign spiked sharply in the week following his outburst. Apparently, for a lot of Republican voters out there, he was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the healthcare bill. They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican officeholders: When it came to opposing my administration, the old rules no longer applied. —

But our most effective public diplomacy tool came straight out of my campaign playbook: During my international trips, I made a point of hosting town hall meetings with young people. The first time we tried it, with a crowd of more than three thousand European students during the NATO summit in Strasbourg, we weren’t sure what to expect. Would I get heckled? Would I bore them with long, convoluted answers? But after an unscripted hour in which members of the audience enthusiastically questioned me on everything from climate change to fighting terrorism and offered their own good-humored observations (including the fact that “Barack” means “peach” in Hungarian), we decided to make it a regular feature of my foreign travel.

If I aspired to lead the free world, I decided, I’d have to make climate change a priority of my campaign and my presidency.

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican voters were even more skeptical. There’d been a time when the federal government’s role in protecting the environment enjoyed the support of both parties. Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed. As the GOP’s electoral base had shifted to the South and the West, where conservation efforts had long rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.