Candidate Election Quotes

If I were to vote, I would intentionally vote for the goofiest candidate. It is my theory that when the people can outwit the leader, the more respected their voices will be.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

When we support or vote for candidates outside the two major political parties we are immediately lectured about wasting our vote or making it easier for the less desirable of the two major candidates to claim victory. These lies are repeated every election and they must be ignored. You never waste your vote if you vote your conscience.

October is the cruelest month of any election year, but by then, the pain is so great that even the strong are like jelly and time has lost all meaning for anybody still involved in a political campaign. By that time, even candidates running unopposed have abandoned all hope of victory and live only for the day when they will finally be free to seek vengeance on all those treacherous bastards who once passed themselves off as loyal friends and allies and swore they were only in it because they all shared the same hopes and dreams....

I'd like to vote for the candidate similar to the one the Right absurdly claims Obama is.

When a presidential candidate is publicly requesting help from the Russians, you know that there is something seriously going wrong in the USA.

The only candidate I'd allow to play my music would be Bigfoot, and unless we're talking about foraging for squirrels, he's notoriously apolitical.

But he knew that on the day of a general election, every candidate is convinced he is going to win, even the Liberals. Giles

I hereby state, and mean all that I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve.

In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing.

I am not a party candidate, and if elected cannot be President of a party, but the President of the whole people.

Eugene McCarthy was the last American presidential candidate who thought flattering an audience’s intelligence was the way to win their hearts and their votes.

It seems likely MK-Ultra or a Manchurian Candidate, or possibly both, may have been involved in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the US Presidential candidate most political analysts agree would have been elected President had he lived.

The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a weight so heavy that it can take an election as bizarre as 2016 and jam the result into the same grooves as Romney’s contest with Obama or Bush’s race against Kerry. We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.

Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge.

The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.

To realize one's dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to ourselves; the angels vote.

Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity.

Typically, in politics, more than one horse is owned and managed by the same team in an election. There's always and extra candidate who will slightly mimic the views of their team's opposing horse, to cancel out that person by stealing their votes just so the main horse can win. Elections are puppet shows. Regardless of their rainbow coats and many smiles, the agenda is one and the same.

Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.

How the Committee of 300 Arranges Elections The term “fair and free elections” has no meaning in the U.S. The candidates for the presidency are selected by the Committee of 300 so in reality it does not matter who “wins” the election and goes on to the White House. The

I have not voted in a human presidential election for quite some time, Jonathan. Admittedly, it may not be my place. Still, do you know what really stops me from selecting a candidate?” Jonathan listened but mostly focused on containing his nausea. “It’s a paradox, I know. It just seems that anyone smart enough to know the responsibility of such a seat of power would never be dumb enough to apply for it.

Political winds were blowing to the right, and Zack was very concerned about the next election and how a potential candidate might affect citizens' rights . . . an organization like the church, for instance, would be in a position to wield enormous influence over certain candidates, if any happened to become president of the United States.

The anti-Trump movement is a conspiracy by the powerful and connected to overturn the will of the American people. Among the co-conspirators are FBI officials illegally exonerating their favorite candidate of violating well-defined federal criminal statutes, first to help her get elected and then to frame Donald J. Trump for “Russia collusion” that never happened.

One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31

On Election Day, we select our representatives by secret ballot, and we choose our candidates based on their ability to protect our individual rights, not the rights of the group of people with which we most closely identify.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.

[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

But history is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than example of people who ran too soon." - David Axelrod

Praise and blame are all the same is a fancy way of reminding yourself of the old cliché that you’ll never be able to please all the people all the time. Even in a landslide election victory in which a candidate secures 55 percent of the vote, he or she is left with 45 percent of the population that wishes someone else were the winner. Pretty humbling, isn’t it?

Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is “God’s man” for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus’ time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was “God’s man” for the empire.

In October, political advertisements bloom on all the signboards and at the interstate exits. If there is a space, there is a sign. They will stay there long after the elections, in fact until storms batter them down. Candidates are supposed to take them down the day after the election, but I have yet to see that happen. Half the candidates are too happy to bother; the others are too depressed.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.

The nation’s leaders keep throwing out the word “Washington” as a vulgar abstraction. Nothing new here: the anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned.

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

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, “elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.

The little man behind that desk was the joke candidate of election years, best remembered for his trademark yellow bowtie. In Riker's fashion philosophy, bows should be reserved to the pigtails of little girls or the collars of tiny dogs hatched from peanut shells.

For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food.” Bannon tried to sit down with Trump and walk him through refinements of the strategy and how to focus on particular states. The candidate had no interest in talking about it.

Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn, one a political scientist and the other an economist, argue that “approval voting” allows voters to express their true preferences without concern for electability.8 Under approval voting, each voter may vote for as many candidates as he wishes.

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

I was not a great man whose history has been recorded for children to study in school. No bells will ring for me, no flags descend upon their mast. For I was an ordinary man, my son, one of many, with ordinary hopes and ordinary dreams and ordinary fears. I, too, dreamed of wealth and riches, health and strength. I, too, feared hunger and poverty, war and weakness. I was the neighbour who lived in the next house. The man standing in the subway on his way to work: who held a match to his cigarette: who walked with his dog. I was the soldier shaking with fear: the man berating the umpire at the ball game: the citizen in the privacy of the voting booth, happily electing the worthless candidate. I was the man who lived a thousand times and died a thousand times in all man’s six thousand years of record. I was the man who sailed with Noah  in his ark, who was the multitude that crossed the sea that Moses held apart, who hung from the cross next to Christ. I was the ordinary man about whom songs are never written, stories are never told, legends are never remembered.

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.

Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”31 Wolfe strategically illustrates how body-shame social messaging is used as a means of controlling and centralizing political power. We need look no further than the 2016 U.S. presidential election to see Wolfe’s thesis in action. Candidate Hillary Clinton was exhaustingly scrutinized about her aesthetic presentation. Outfits, makeup, hairstyles were all fodder for the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Even the pro-Hillary, hundred-thousand-plus-member Facebook group Pantsuit Nation chose her penchant for eschewing skirts and dresses as the name of their collective, inadvertently directing public focus to her physical appearance rather than her decades of political experience.

The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas - when some twisted little geek blew the President's off... and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the "Peace Candidate." Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the who structure of "government.

The political merchandisers appeal only to the weak­nesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this pur­pose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully se­lected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These interviews in depth reveal the uncon­scious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given so­ciety at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the new dispen­sation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The person­ality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really mat­ter. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to con­centrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and prefera­bly (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex is­sues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most con­scientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchan­dise the political candidate as though he were a deo­dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.

Take politics in a place like the United States. To run for president in 2008 will require that candidates raise in excess of $100 million each in order to be truly competitive. That means that before there was one primary election among voters, there was a “money primary” in 2007 that selected which candidates voters would see.

Just imagine: if a member of the party (elected member of parliament, candidate or simple activist) were to make a public commitment, ‘Whenever I shall have to examine any political or social issue, I swear I will absolutely forget that I am the member of a certain political group; my sole concern will be to ascertain what should be done in order to best serve the public interest and justice.’ Such words would not be welcome. His comrades and even many other people would accuse him of betrayal. Even the least hostile would say, ‘Why then did he join a political party?’ – thus naively confessing that, when joining a political party, one gives up the idea of serving nothing but the public interest and justice. This man would be expelled from his party, or at least denied pre-selection; he would certainly never be elected.

The winning candidate, now the president elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible. Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump's top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama's temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world's largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump's victory, registered a 50 percent gain.

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that. She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window. She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms) Next Door Sex (in its many forms) Slugs Friends were: God Our dog Auntie Madge The Novels of Charlotte Bronte Slug pellets and me, at first.

Back in 2007, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan had been asked by the Zürich daily Tages-Anzeiger which candidate he was supporting in the upcoming presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.

Not to mention that a crown is too high a reward ever to be given to merit alone, and will always induce the candidates to employ force, or money, or intrigue, to procure the votes of the electors: so that such an election will give no better chance for superior merit in the prince, than if the state had trusted to birth alone for determining the sovereign.

I don't want everybody to vote... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

From 1836 to 1868, only one candidate was elected to the presidency more than once—Abraham Lincoln.

Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter,

Elections are not the choice of the best candidate, but the choice of the best of the worst.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti.

Know your candidates. Know who they are and what party they are representing.

Trump is what happens when a Presidential candidate isn’t pushed hard enough to release his tax returns. If he did, all this corruption would have been exposed before the election.

The Whigs nominated four regional candidates, hoping to send the election to the House of Representatives, but Van Buren prevailed, winning the presidency in the election of 1836.

The top echelon of our intelligence agencies, whose salaries we pay, decided we didn’t deserve a free and fair election! Why isn’t this the biggest scandal in America today? Why isn’t a sitting president’s use of national security surveillance against a candidate from the opposite party in a presidential election at least as big as Watergate? The answer is: it is!

The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump's victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy...We need to remember this the next time we're asked to back a party or candidate in an election. In this destabilized era, status-quo politicians often cannot get the job done. On the other hand, the choice that may at first seem radical, maybe even a little risky, may well be the most pragmatic one in this volatile era...radical political and economic change is our only hope of avoiding radical change to our physical world.

The repeated elections of Republican candidates, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, George Bush in 1988, were treated by the press with words like “landslide” and “overwhelming victory.” They were ignoring four facts: that roughly half the population, though eligible to vote, did not; that those who did vote were limited severely in their choices to the two parties that monopolized the money and the media; that as a result many of their votes were cast without enthusiasm; and that there was little relationship between voting for a candidate and voting for specific policies.

this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.

When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi.

Clinton was the first candidate for the job of first lady to have a life that reflected post-second-wave America and the many working women who made their careers and raised their families here.

In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

Most people who wonder why our politics are so corrupt can’t draw the line from racist theories of limited democracy to today’s system, but the small group of white men who are funding the effort to turn back the clock on political equality can lay claim to a long ideological pedigree: from the original property requirement to people like John C. Calhoun, who advocated states’ rights and limited government in defense of slavery, to the Supreme Court justices who decided Shelby County and Citizens United. Over the past few decades, a series of money-in-politics lawsuits, including Citizens United, have overturned anticorruption protections, making it possible for a wealthy individual to give more than $3.5 million to a party and its candidates in an election cycle, for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to get candidates elected or defeated, and for secret money to sway elections. The result is a racially skewed system of influence and electoral gatekeeping that invalidates the voices of most Americans.

and promised them that if the conservative candidate won the election they would all receive a bonus, but that if he lost they would lose their jobs. In addition, they rigged the ballot boxes and bribed the police.

But just take the jurists' side for a moment: why, in fact, should a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view! It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the Interrogators, the prosecutor's staff, the internal guard in the prison, and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.

Hunter argues that evangelical Christian attempts to “change the world” through politics—electing the right candidates, who will then pass the right laws and approve the right justices for the Supreme Court—have largely failed.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 74 million votes, more than any presidential candidate in history with the exception of Joe Biden, who won 81 million votes. Biden secured the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232.

There were parts of the book that made me cringe – the stuff about his family and how much he loved his wife was all a bit saccharine for my tastes. Some of the writing was overly flowery. But I think possibly Australians are a bit more reserved with this stuff (a bit more British) than Americans and what makes us cringe might well seem quite endearing in the US. 〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 텔 - KrTop "코리아탑" 〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 All the same, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a candidate for US President did not have to declare themselves Christian to have any hope of being elected? As a nation that has had at least one Agnostic Prime Minister (Bob Hawke – although, as the joke went, that was only because Bob wasn’t sure if he was God or not) it seems insane the obsession that religion is in American politics. For a country that likes a personal relationship with God the US certainly does like that personal relationship to be as public as possible.

not only did Horace Greeley, in less than a month’s time, lose his wife, the election, his money, his mind, and his own life, but he also became the only presidential candidate of a major political party to receive no electoral votes.

As a result, we stood witness to the biggest scandal in American history, bar none: an attempted elimination of a presidential candidate and then coup against the duly elected president of the United States from within the government itself.

1934 it became apparent that the Germans were swiftly rearming, the leader of the British Labour Party vowed “to close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and he got his candidate elected by saying so.7 The Peace Ballot, a national survey of public opinion, was distributed throughout Great Britain in 1935 and a majority of those polled stated that while they supported collective national security, they did so only “by all means short of war.” At a time when Hitler was

During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama's success--campaigns are about telling the American people a story--a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It's a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.

And obviously: If they had a sound reason, grounded in real evidence, for suspecting a presidential candidate was in a corrupt conspiracy with a foreign power, they should not only be able to tell us what it is; they should be anxious to tell us what it is.

The official obeys whom he serves. Nominated independently of the people, elected because there is no choice between candidates so nominated, the official feels responsibility to his master alone, and his master is the political machine of his party. The people whom he serves in theory, he may safely disobey; having the support of his political organization, he is sure of his renomination and knows he will be carried through the election, because his opponent will offer nothing better to the long suffering voter

In the general election, Nixon refined Goldwater’s southern strategy. Unlike Goldwater, who “ran as a racist candidate,” Nixon said, the 1968 GOP nominee campaigned on racial themes without explicitly mentioning race. “Law and order” replaced “states’ rights.” Pledging to weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws replaced outright opposition to them. Nixon “always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal,” said his top aide, John Ehrlichman.

My disagreements with Joel come to a head when he tells me to establish PACs in other countries. Political action committees, of course, are an American invention that pull together donors to give money to political candidates. There are PACs for every possible cause: to elect more women to office and to elect candidates who are friendly to Realtors, or beer wholesalers, or teachers’ unions. Home Depot runs its own giant PAC, as does AT&T. “We were so late in establishing Facebook’s PAC in the US; I don’t want to make that mistake

Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people's opinions than changing their behaviors?

At least in a casino, depending on the game, people have a slightly less than fifty percent chance of winning. In the long run, the house always wins, but a gambler can get lucky every once in a while. In the Tyranny’s elections, both options play for the house. If someone outside of Party A or B tries to run for office, it becomes the house’s mission to make sure everyone knows that only A and B are viable candidates. After being told this a hundred times, people believe it. After being told anything a hundred times, people will believe anything.

And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough.

Looking back on the Dixiecrat challenge, Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

I would like to hear the words "public lands" spoken in every election debate, with candidates holding both government and corporations accountable in their oversight and use. The fact of more than three hundred million visits to our national parks last year tells me I am not alone.

Elections outside the workplace stand in an ambivalent relation to capitalism’s exclusion of real democracy inside. On the one hand, elections distract people from their conscious and unconscious upsets with working conditions. Elections focus instead on political candidates, parties, and alternative policies around issues other than capitalism versus alternative economic systems and other than their respective working conditions. That is why supporters of capitalism appreciate elections. Well-controlled elections do not question, let alone threaten, capitalism.

Election night had turned into an occasion to celebrate or to drown sorrows. Regardless of the outcome, there was an excuse to party, to drink, and to curse the other side, that terrible separate half of society who were too stupid to see things the 'right' way. It seemed odd to Adam that most elections were evenly split. Forty percent of the votes were usually for the most pro-business candidate, who somehow convinced another ten percent or so of the voting public to go along with him or her, either through a barrage of false ads or by paying the media for positive coverage.

Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.

don’t forget about local elections. State legislatures have a huge influence on what you can and can’t do where you live; the mayor approves the city budget on things like police or school funding; your local district attorney has say over who goes to prison and who doesn’t. Local elections can even get your potholes filled, and I think we’re all anti-potholes. So do your research on the candidates just as you would for a president. Attend their speeches and debates when you can, call them out on issues of fairness and bias. Make them accountable to their records in a public forum.

Our campaigns have not grown more humanistic because our candidates are more benevolent or their policy concerns more salient. In fact, over the last decade, public confidence in institutions-- big business, the church, media, government-- has declined dramatically. The political conversation has privileged the nasty and trivial. Yet during that period, election seasons have awakened with a new culture of volunteer activity. This cannot be credited to a politics inspiring people to hand over their time but rather to campaign, newly alert to the irreplaceable value of a human touch, seeking it out. Finally campaigns are learning to quantify the ineffable—the value of a neighbor's knock, of a stranger's call, the delicate condition of being undecided-- and isolate the moment where a behavior can be changed, or a heart won. Campaigns have started treating voters like people again.

The Obama administration exploited every tool in its arsenal (surveillance, informants, foreign-intelligence agencies, moribund and constitutionally untenable criminal statutes) to try to make a criminal case on Trump—the candidate Obama deeply opposed—despite the absence of incriminating evidence.

Although the President publicly stated during and after the election that he had no connection to Russia, the Trump Organization, through Michael Cohen, was pursuing the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project through June 2016 and candidate Trump was repeatedly briefed on the progress of those efforts.

The childlike disbelief had manifested itself immediately after the election in embarrassing ways, from morning-after posts titled “What Am I Going to Tell My Daughter?” (one friend suggested telling her Trump won, that shit happens, grow up, this is how the world works—and next time find a better candidate)

People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.” To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost’s team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo. The same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more. When his odds dropped, they liked him less. Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It’s a given that it’s nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don’t do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare.

Richard Nixon won in forty-nine states by, for one thing, appealing to the inherent racism of the American people. Voters saw him—a Harris poll two months after the election showed this plainly—as the candidate who would put a stop to school busing and the encroachment of blacks and other minorities on white jobs

One business practice I want to eliminate is the use of microtargeting in political advertising. Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individual voters that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election. Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values. Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that. If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.

Rather than the sanctimonious bullshit of politicians about “the good people of this fair state,” I would joyously vote for any candidate who had the courage to stand up and say, “Look, I’m going to steal from you. I’m going to line my pockets and those of my friends, but I’m not going to steal too much. But in the deal I’ll give you better roads, safer schools, better education, and a happier condition of life. I’m not going to do it out of compassion or dedication to the good people of this fair state; I’m going to do it because if I do these things, you’ll elect me again and I can steal a little bit more.” That joker has my vote, no arguments.

I had bad feelings about an election in the year of the monkey. Don't worry, everyone said, the majority rules. No so, I retaliated, the silent rule and it will be decided by them, those who do not vote. And who can blame them, when it's all a pack of lies, a tainted election lined in waste? A true darkening of days. All of the resources that could be used to scrape away lead from the walls of crumbling schools, to shelter the homeless, or to clean a foul river. Instead, one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name, another kind of immoral waste. Nonetheless, despite the misgivings, I voted.

In the United States, congressional and state elections typically attract little voter interest, and voters have scant knowledge about the names of their representatives or their challengers. A growing body of research suggests that, for these politicians, particularly during primaries, being implicated in a scandal may actually be beneficial (Burden, 2002). This benefit is particularly pronounced for office challengers. As Mann and Wolfinger (1980) first noted, people are better at recognizing a candidate’s name than spontaneously recalling it. This is important because voting only requires that voters recognize a name on a ballot. Thus, participation in scandal may be beneficial at these lower levels because it increases name recognition, which may translate into a higher percentage of the vote. However, for major political candidates, scandals are detrimental because voters already possess information about them and are more inclined to follow the details of the scandal.

The smart voter is politically-fluid in that they don't rigidly believe that the same viewpoint, party manifesto or individual is the poultice for all maladies in every election. They attune themselves to the zeitgeist, search for potentially-reputable parties and candidates with suitable policies and cast their vote accordingly.

It was plausible to vote for Trump if you saw him as the demented Discordian Pope of Chaos, the clown prince whose incompetence and recklessness would bring about the complete destruction of the current paradigm, and its replacement by something much better – Meritocracy. There is no other excuse. He is the stupid man’s candidate.

The formula was the same formula we see in every election: Republicans demonize government, sixties-style activism, and foreigners. Democrats demonize corporations, greed, and the right-wing rabble. Both candidates were selling the public a storyline that had nothing to do with the truth. Gas prices were going up for reasons completely unconnected to the causes these candidates were talking about. What really happened was that Wall Street had opened a new table in its casino. The new gaming table was called commodity index investing. And when it became the hottest new game in town, America suddenly got a very painful lesson in the glorious possibilities of taxation without representation. Wall Street turned gas prices into a gaming table, and when they hit a hot streak we ended up making exorbitant involuntary payments for a commodity that one simply cannot live without. Wall Street gambled, you paid the big number, and what they ended up doing with some of that money you lost is the most amazing thing of all. They got America—you, me, Priscilla Carillo, Robert Lukens—to pawn itself to pay for the gas they forced us to buy in the first place. Pawn its bridges, highways, and airports. Literally sell our sovereign territory. It was a scam of almost breathtaking beauty, if you’re inclined to appreciate that sort of thing.

So you have to  ask, “Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?” You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: “the worse, the better.” If you get the worse candidate in, it’s going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.

A brick could be used to help defeat all incumbent politicians whose last name starts with Brj and anything after that alphabetically. Since people tend to vote for the first one on the ballot, Brick would not only benefit from the stupidity of the citizenry, but the people would benefit by electing the smarter of the two candidates. 


We need to do something that bold. Something that will upset the entire game. In 2016, we should call for an “electoral blank-out.” We vote in the national election for the presidency of the United States, but we leave the ballot blank or write in “none of the above.” This isn’t your standard call for a third-party candidate or an independent black political thrust. Nor is it a rejection of our sacred duty to vote. Exercising the franchise is sacred. Actually, I want black people to turn out for the election in record numbers without Obama on the ticket, but give our attention to other issues on the ballot. We should vote in congressional, state, and local elections.

Our aim should be to eliminate politics altogether, but in the meantime, we must continue to humanize the democracy of today by empowering the good politicians and methodically placing political power only in the hands of the capable through proper training and licensing, like in medical practice, and not through random selection and election of candidates.

McCain said the lower gas prices were sitting somewhere under the Gulf of Mexico. Obama said they were sitting in the bank accounts of companies like Exxon in the form of windfall profits to be taxed. The formula was the same formula we see in every election: Republicans demonize government, sixties-style activism, and foreigners. Democrats demonize corporations, greed, and the right-wing rabble. Both candidates were selling the public a storyline that had nothing to do with the truth. Gas prices were going up for reasons completely unconnected to the causes these candidates were talking about. What really happened was that Wall Street had opened a new table in its casino. The new gaming table was called commodity index investing. And when it became the hottest new game in town, America suddenly got a very painful lesson in the glorious possibilities of taxation without representation. Wall Street turned gas prices into a gaming table, and when they hit a hot streak we ended up making exorbitant involuntary payments for a commodity that one simply cannot live without.

Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins. But is money the cause of the victory? It might seem logical to think so, much as it might have seemed logical that a booming 1990s economy helped reduce crime. But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors — let’s call them X and Y—but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It’s possible that X causes Y; it’s also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor, Z. Think about this correlation: cities with a lot of murders also tend to have a lot of police officers. Consider now the police/murder correlation in a pair of real cities. Denver and Washington, D.C., have about the same population — but Washington has nearly three times as many police as Denver, and it also has eight times the number of murders. Unless you have more information, however, it’s hard to say what’s causing what. Someone who didn’t know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generally provokes a wayward response. Consider the folktale of the czar who learned that the most disease ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promptly ordered all the doctors shot dead.

Never in America’s history, though—however many sideburns Bowery barbers shaved or immigrants came ashore—had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, his victory so outraged his opposition that an entire region of the country broke away. But in loss Stephen A. Douglas never claimed the election was “rigged.

The Tea Party was noteworthy for its hostility to both the Democratic and the Republican parties. When it turned to electoral politics, the Tea Party backed antiestablishment candidates, with a mixed record in general elections. That was because the Tea Party brought out both optimistic, forward-looking, mainstream supply-siders and pessimistic, anti-institutional, conspiracy-minded extremists.

When it came to the mechanics of presidential elections, the Constitution had rather light-heartedly ruled that the candidate who got the most votes in the Electoral College would become president, while the runner-up would become the vice president. This deliberately ignored the matter of faction or party, which came to a head in 1796, when the Proto-Federalist Adams was elected president while the Proto-Republican Jefferson became vice president. In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment allowed for party interest by requiring separate balloting for president and vice president. The Electoral College, however, remains to this day solidly in place to ensure that majoritarian governance can never interfere with those rights of property that the founders believed not only inalienable but possibly divine.

the KGB was working hard to try to ensure that Thatcher lost the 1983 general election. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Thatcher was “the Iron Lady”—a nickname intended as an insult by the Soviet army newspaper that coined it, but one in which she reveled—and the KGB had been organizing “active measures” to undermine her ever since she came to power in 1979, including the placing of negative articles with sympathetic left-wing journalists. The KGB still had contacts on the left, and Moscow clung to the illusion that it might be able to influence the election in favor of the Labour Party, whose leader, after all, was still listed in KGB files as a “confidential contact.” In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.

If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest—That which is best administered is best,"—yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.

Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump in an ungaurded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established stamdards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate's voice.

The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to “make America great again” is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they’re headed the same route with Hispanics. That’s a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004. Trump

No more than two opinions or ideas on any one issue should be out there, the General said. Look at the voting system. Same concept. We had multiple parties and candidates and look at the mess we had. Here you choose the left hand or the right and that’s more than enough. Two choices and look at all the drama with every presidential election. Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less

Churchill wrote to his friend and colleague Alfred Duff Cooper that there were some “unpleasant features in this election which indicate the rise of bad elements.” He added, “Conscientious objectors were preferred to candidates of real military achievement and service.” Members of Parliament “who had done the most to hamper and obstruct the war were returned by enormously increased majorities.” And, “None of the values of the years before were preserved.

Once Reagan was elected, the Republican strategy had two components. The first was to build from the bottom up, getting the party rooted so it could win state and local elections, then congressional elections, then the presidency. When it comes to the presidency, liberal Democrats have daddy issues, even when their candidate is a woman. Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country's problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little. And so they are perpetually dissatisfied with their presidents and snipe at them from the left, which is the last thing a Democratic president in the current environment needs.

So, like all right-wing parties that depend on rural voters, the Republican Party has an interest in maintaining, not alleviating, their struggles. Rural voters who are satisfied and optimistic might consider the entreaties of both parties, but the more dissatisfied and angrier they are, the more they'll stick with the GOP. Come Election Day, despair is a Republican candidate's chief asset, because that despair is easiest to convert into anger, and that anger into votes

And yet the debate was highly informative—if you turned the sound off. The event was broadcast with a split screen so that each presidential candidate was visible while the other candidate was talking. The talk was insipid, but the expressions on the candidates’ faces were fascinating. Trump was serious of mien. He concentrated intently on what Hillary was saying. Sometimes there was a little twitch of annoyance; sometimes, a small frown of disagreement. But mostly he looked deeply thoughtful. (Where he got that look is anyone’s guess. Maybe he purchased it at the same strange haberdashery where Hillary buys her Hillary costume.) Clinton is supposed to be the one with the deep thoughts. But there she was thoughtlessly making rude grimaces whenever Trump was speaking. Mom always said, “You shouldn’t make faces—your face may get stuck that way.” Hillary’s face got stuck that way. She spent the whole evening with a wipe-that-look-off-your-face look on her face. She

The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote. Stop the Steal, Inc. I

IN THE UNITED STATES, OUR courts adjudicate claims of election fraud. Elections can’t be overturned based merely on accusations, or because someone says they believe there has been fraud. Sufficient evidence is required, and the fraud must have occurred on a scale that could change the result. That’s the rule of law. If he had a basis, Donald Trump had the right to bring election challenges in court. What neither he nor any other candidate has the right to do is ignore the rulings of those courts.

Reagan also married the Republican Party and Movement Conservatism to right-wing religious groups. By 1979 the fundamentalists had successfully taken over the Southern Baptist Convention, electing their candidate to be its president. Under him, the Southern Baptists abandoned their previous willingness to include women and minorities and to support reproductive rights. They became active in politics, staunchly supporting the Republican Party, and in the 1980s numbered about fifteen million people.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

For candidates who have no fear of losing to a member of the opposite party, the primary rather than the general election will be the decisive event in their campaigns. Whether liberal or conservative, candidates can be expected to adopt more extreme positions when competing within a single party than when competing with a member of the opposite party. I firmly believe that gerrymandering has made our elected officials more doctrinaire and less willing to compromise with members of the opposite party.

The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote. The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego.

Target’s donation was clearly aimed at electing a governor with free-market priorities that would benefit consumers, workers, and retailers. But left-wing activists didn’t care about this truth; they wanted to make Target an example. They combed through Emmer’s record, looking for a politically sensitive issue, and landed on the candidate’s opposition to gay marriage. At the time, Emmer wasn’t out of the mainstream in that position. In 2008, the majority of Americans still opposed gay marriage, as did, for the record, Barack Obama.

I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of “democratic” elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no public assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue.

An exciting follow-up to this event was the many ups and downs when the most developed country in the world made such a mess of its own presidential election that it took several weeks for the Supreme Court to decide 5–4 that the candidate with the most votes had lost. With this, George W. Bush became the president of the United States, while Al Gore was reduced to an environmental agitator whom not even the anarchists in Stockholm paid much attention to. Incidentally, Bush later invaded Iraq in order to eliminate all the weapons Saddam Hussein didn’t have.

Perot went on to create the Reform Party three years later and became its presidential nominee for the 1996 election. Running against Clinton and Bob Dole, Perot still managed to pull in 8.4 percent of the popular vote. Although Perot’s vote totals had fallen in four years, the 1996 results were still dramatic for a third-party presidential candidate. Despite being mocked at times by the mainstream media for his political naïveté, Perot had managed to tap into a developing undercurrent of political distrust and disgust of career politicians by voters. Joining

If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions” when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help.

On a more sinister note, the same study implies that in future US presidential elections Facebook could know not only the political opinions of tens of millions of Americans, but also who among them are the critical swing voters, and how these voters might be swung. Facebook could tell that in Oklahoma the race between Republicans and Democrats is particularly close, identify the 32,417 voters who still haven’t made up their minds, and determine what each candidate needs to say in order to tip the balance. How could Facebook obtain this priceless political data? We provide it for free.

political environment. But there is always a thin line between a peaceful election and armed conflict. We acknowledge this close relationship in the way we use martial jargon to discuss our politics. Candidates battle for states, campaigns are run from war rooms, commercials are part of a media blitz, and campaign volunteers are foot soldiers. “Politics,” the Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz said, “is the womb in which war develops.” Violent conflict is born out in other nations where the martial language of politics is not metaphorical. In the same year that McCain and Obama

Robert T. Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, who won fame as the “Prince of Rails” during the secession winter, was the only one of his children to live to maturity. He became U.S. secretary of war, minister to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman Company following brief service on General Grant’s staff at the end of the Civil War. Though frequently mentioned as a Republican candidate for president, Robert shunned electoral politics. He later brought his mother to trial in a successful effort to have her committed for insanity. Robert died an extremely wealthy man at age eighty-four in 1926.

The next little thing about this vote-for-the-lesser-evil trick, of course—and this is no secret to anyone anymore—is that it drives all the “serious” candidates toward what is commonly referred to as the “moderate center,” even if these serious candidates aren’t, in fact, moderate or centrist in any meaningful sense and the so-called center moves further to the right with each election cycle. For nearly two decades now this process has been steadily advancing on the Democratic side, as liberals are trained to accept the idea that the national majority will never accept a true labor party, or any candidate perceived as “soft” on defense.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

Obamacare, he claimed, was “about capitalism versus socialism.” Republicans opposed socialism, O’Reilly said, “but Republicans have not been able to convince the majority of Americans that income redistribution is harmful.”[4] There was another solution to that dilemma, though: flooding the zone with propaganda. In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or a party.

ballot you go, the more volatile the polls tend to be: polls of House races are less accurate than polls of Senate races, which are in turn less accurate than polls of presidential races. Polls of primaries, also, are considerably less accurate than general election polls. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the average poll missed by about eight points, far more than implied by its margin of error. The problems in polls of the Republican primaries of 2012 may have been even worse.26 In many of the major states, in fact—including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama, and Mississippi—the candidate ahead in the polls a week before the election lost.

...Subordination of the state to Christian values is precisely what the early Puritans, even those in the tradition of the Mayflower Pilgrims, aimed to do. The First Amendment notwithstanding, large numbers of the American public (especially churchgoing Protestant Christians) have embodied this Puritan way of thinking, viewing America as a "Christan nation." Relatively recent poll data bear out the enduring character of these Puritan convictions. According to a Pew Forum poll held just prior to the 2004 election, over one-half of the public would have reservations voting for a candidate with no religious affiliation (31 percent refusing to vote for a Muslim and 15 percent for a Catholic).

From 1984 until 2016 the Senate ballot paper worked on a group voting ticket basis: either you voted for one party above the line, or you laboriously numbered every single individual candidate in order of preference. Since this typically involved ranking between sixty and a hundred-plus boxes for people of whom even the most ardent upper house enthusiast had never heard, only a tiny fraction of the voting population bothered to do so—less than 3 per cent in the 2013 election—typically because they bore a particular grudge against a specific party or candidate and were willing to sacrifice quarter of an hour of box-numbering simply to experience the righteous thrill of putting their political nemesis last.

Established politicians are also bumping into a new cast of characters within corridors of legislative power. In 2010 parliamentary elections in Brazil, for example, the candidate who won the most votes anywhere in the country (and the second-most-voted congressman in the country's history) was a clown - an actual clown who went by the name of Tiririca and wore his clown costume while he campaigned. His platform was as anti-politician as it gets. "I don't know what a representative in congress does," he told voters in YouTube video that attracted millions of voters, "but if you send me there I will tell you". He also explained that his goal was "to help needy people in this country, but especially my family".

NBC News reporter Douglas Kiker observed, while covering the Wallace campaign, “It was as if somewhere, sometime a while back, George Wallace had been awakened by a white, blinding vision: they all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern! Anybody who travels with Wallace these days on his presidential campaign finds it hard to resist arriving at the same conclusion.” Wallace voters who agreed to be interviewed sounded like Trump voters in 2016. Most of them denied race had anything to do with their choice of candidate. They said they supported Wallace because he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability." "Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control." For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope? We have seen the triumph of advertising's bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: "New" in what way? "Improved" how? "Better" than what? "Change" what in particular? "Hope" for what? These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony. Whether or not a spouse is "respecting the other's space," is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He'd simply like to "hope.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

The final deal never went through, perhaps because it would have made the Russian sources of Trump’s apparent success just a bit too obvious at the moment when his presidential campaign was gaining momentum. The fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” had more important things to do. In the words of Felix Sater, writing in November 2015, “Our boy can become president of the United States and we can engineer it.” In 2016, just when Trump needed money to run a campaign, his properties became extremely popular for shell companies. In the half year between his nomination as the Republican candidate and his victory in the general election, some 70% of the units sold in his buildings were purchased not by human beings but by limited liability companies.

While the party of Obama has little in common with that of JFK, for a better comparison, try exploring the Communist Party USA’s website (CPUSA.org), and you’ll be stunned at the resemblance between it and today’s Democratic Party. You might also take a moment to thoughtfully reflect on the Democrats’ candidates who in recent decades were either elected, or nearly elected, as president: Bill Clinton, a serial sexual predator; Al Gore, by many accounts a raving lunatic; John Kerry, who betrayed his fellow Vietnam vets and his country;10 Barack Obama, a deceitful, America-hating, Far-Left radical; and Hillary Clinton, accurately described by Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient William Safire as “a congenital liar.”11 Whatever

As we march toward the reality that, by 2050, no one racial or ethnic group will hold a proportional majority in this country, racial suicide paranoia abounds. And for the white racist legislators in the red states, nothing is more threatening than a majority-brown country; it strips them of their historic power. The prospect of being outnumbered is what enabled the Tea Party's mutiny of Congress in 2010 after the election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, allowing it to cripple the Republican establishment; render the first major-party female presidential candidate powerless; and enable the rise of the racist, nationalistic, and misogynistic Donald Trump The white people who are still in charge believe that if their women don't start having lots of babies they- the white patriarchs - are going to become obsolete.

When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.

On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed. Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words: “It’s good action!” I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.

A politics of struggle is rooted in values and vision, and above all trust. It involves a compact a candidate makes with the people who share the values, who embrace the vision. It doesn't say, "Vote for me and I'll fix everything." It says, "If I get elected, I will not just work for you, I will work with you." The work may mean implementing a program at the local level or sponsoring legislation at the federal level, but what matters most is the connection that is made between people and their elected representative- the connection that says there is someone on the inside who is going to fight for the citizen outside the halls of power. When citizens recognize that this fight is being waged, they are energized. They make bigger demands. They build stronger movements. They forge a politics that is about transforming a city, a state, a nation, and maybe the world.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

Regardless of what you might have heard or read over the last six years, change comes only by repenting and hope comes only by faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you truly want change and hope in America, we have to put godly men back in Washington, DC. I don’t believe you should vote for a politician unless they will at least mention God. I also believe that at some point during a political campaign, the candidate needs to say, “I’m running because I love you and I’m really concerned about our nation.” I think it’s time for the people that we elect to represent us to tell us they love us. It would make me feel a lot better about the process and what’s going on with our government. If I knew the politicians actually loved me, I might have a better feeling about where our country is headed. I certainly don’t like the direction it’s headed now, that’s for sure.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

The system used to elect members of the legislatures of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district (or ‘constituency’) in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature, and that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district. This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.

But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men. During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times. And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’, although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.

Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “There’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia . . . there’s no Russia.

You Jews have no political sense whatsoever, and we Irish have a genius for it. When you argue or campaign for office, you fight on the issues. And when you lose, you console yourselves with the thought you fought on the issues and argued reasonably and logically. It must have been a Jew who said he’d rather be right than President. An Irishman knows better; he knows that you can do nothing unless you’re elected. So the first principle of politics is to get elected. And the second great principle is that a candidate is not elected because he’s the logical choice, but because of the way he has his hair cut, or the hat he wears, or his accent. That’s the way we pick even the President of the United States, and for that matter, that’s the way a man picks his wife. Now wherever you have a political situation, political principles apply. So don’t you worry as to why or how you were chosen. You just be happy that you were chosen.

The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response. And in today’s world, that means recognizing that it’s impossible to have a well-informed citizenry without having a well-connected citizenry. While education remains important, it is now connection that is the key. A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another—as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make. Moreover, if citizens feel deprived of a meaningful opportunity to participate in the national conversation, they can scarcely be blamed for developing a lack of interest in the process. And sure enough, numerous surveys and studies have documented the erosion of public knowledge of basic facts about our democracy. For example, from the data compiled by the National Election Studies on one recent election, only 15 percent of respondents could recall the name of even one of the candidates in the election in their district. Less than 4 percent could name two candidates. When there are so few competitive races, it’s hard to blame them. Two professors, James Snyder and David Stromberg, found that knowledge of candidates increased in media markets where the local newspaper covered the congressional representative more. Very few respondents claimed to learn anything at all about their congressional elections from television news.

That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level. Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process.

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

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

The Mystery of Futile Debate: Why do we engage endlessly in futile political debates? We can argue politics forever, with nary a hint of progress. The likelihood of anyone changing his or her mind as the result of a political argument is negligible, but we debate anyway. Whether on street corners or on "Meet the Press," political discussions go on and on, and are only rarely resolved by polite compromise. It would be astonishing if a presidential candidate were to decide, mid-debate, that the other candidate was right: CANDIDATE: You know, Senator, I never looked at it that way before, but you're actually completely right! Since it's such an important point, I guess I'll just concede the whole election to you right now -- you are definitely the better candidate. Congratulations! If a candidate actually did say something like that, he or she would soon face overpowering citizen anger** -- at having violated the unspoken rule that debates are supposed to be futile. ** Not to mention, a free one-way ticket to a psychiatric institution.

Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim. Still, the truth is undeniable. No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than

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.

Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests. Now it was a diplomatist—that is, a practical manager of one kind of government matters—who invented that wonderful phrase—a whole world full of humbug in half-a-dozen words—that “Language was given to us to conceal our thoughts.” It was another diplomatist, who said “An ambassador is a gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” But need I explain to my own beloved countrymen that there is humbug in politics? Does anybody go into a political campaign without it? are no exaggerations of our candidate’s merits to be allowed? no depreciations of the other candidate? Shall we no longer prove that the success of the party opposed to us will overwhelm the land in ruin? Let me see. Leaving out the two elections of General Washington, eighteen times that very fact has been proved by the party that was beaten, and immediately we have not been ruined, notwithstanding that the dreadful fatal fellows on the other side got their hands on the offices and their fingers into the treasury.

you have to understand something about presidential elections in general. The politicians devise strategies and court donors years in advance. At the same time, newspapers and networks carefully decide which reporter they’ll match with which candidate. Trump wasn’t part of anyone’s plan. For that matter, neither was I. Five days into my New York trip, while I was running an errand, I got a call from a friend at work. “Hey, Katy. Heads up,” the friend said. “Deborah Turness [my boss] is going to assign you to Trump full-time. [David, another boss] Verdi is going to call. If you don’t want to do this, you better figure out what you’re going to say to get out of it. Don’t let on that I told you, but get ready.” Anxiety. Indecision. Italy. My vacation with Benoît is in just over a week. On the other hand, as good as life can be in Europe, there’s also a lot of professional boredom. It would be nice to get some TV time. And New York is unbeatable in the summer. I hung up and paced the sidewalk. Then I called a friend from CBS. “They want me to cover Trump full-time,” I told him. My friend had covered Romney in 2012. “What do I do?

The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs: if Nixon had made up his mind which he wanted, the Northern Negro or Southern white vote; if the Puerto Rican Catholic bishops had made their intolerant intervention into Puerto Rican politics earlier and if Nixon had taken advantage of it; if the hysterical States-Righters of Dallas had not roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the hotel lobby; if Eisenhower had been used earlier; if Nixon had moved as forthrightly as did John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the Martin Luther King arrest; if only the citizen Democrats of California and the new coagulating boss groups of California had been able to work together in harness, as they could not; if Nixon had clung to his original television strategy and not panicked; if Nixon had clung to the original Forward theme of Hall and Shepley—an interminable series of ifs can be strung together to account for, reverse or multiply the tiny margin of 112,000 popular votes by which Kennedy led Nixon. Yet when all these ifs are strung together, they are only the froth and the foam in the wake of the strategies of the two candidates who sought to lead the American people.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.

I beg your pardon?" says Howard. Freddie clears his throat, and forces himself to look Howard in the eye. "I said, I'm God." He folds his arms very tightly, and looks away over Howard's shoulder. He is plainly embarrassed. So is Howard. He is embarrassed to have embarrassed Freddie. "I'm terribly sorry," says Howard. "Can't be helped," says Freddie. "Just one of those things." "I mean, I'm sorry not to have known." "Not at all. I'm sorry I had to spring it on you like that." There is an awkward silence. Freddie fiddles with his biscuit, breaking it into small pieces, and dropping crumbs which catch in the hairy surface of his trousers. "Well," says Howard. "Congratulations." "Oh," says Freddie. "Thanks." ---------- The more Howard thinks about it, the less he knows where to look or what to do with his hands. He tries putting them behind his back and looking at the floor, smiling reflectively. Freddie is having difficulties, too. He puts his dry biscuit down, and with his left hand seizes his right elbow. With his right hand he takes hold of his chin. Then he, too, examines the floor. "On second thoughts," he says, "I don't know about congratulations. Not like being elected to a fellowship, or whatever. Wasn't open to other candidates, you see.

opportunities inherent in the logic of the system. The American system of government has never separated money from political power, and in the two decades before Trump’s election, the role of money in American politics had grown manifold. Elections are decided by money: unlike in many other democracies, where electoral campaigns last from several weeks to a few months, are financed by government grants and/or subjected to strict spending limits—in the United States, it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place. National and state party machines reinforce this system by apportioning access to public debates on the basis of the amount of money a candidate has secured. Access to media, which is to say, access to voters, also costs money: where in many democracies media are bound by obligations to provide airtime to candidates, in America the primary vehicle for addressing voters is through paid advertisements. No one in the political mainstream seemed to think anything was wrong with the marriage of money and politics. Former elected officials went to work as lobbyists. Using campaign contributions and lobbying to create (or kill) laws was normal. Power begat more money, and money begat more power. We could call the system that preceded and precipitated Trump’s rise an oligarchy, and we would be right.

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

On November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI, Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing: Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. . . . Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.... We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer.327 Later that day, Sater followed up: Donald doesn't stare down, he negotiates and understands the economic issues and Putin only want to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. "Business, politics, whatever it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal" I think I can get Putin to say that at the Trump Moscow press conference. If he says it we own this election. Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate. . . . We can own this election. Michael my next steps are very sensitive with Putins very very close people, we can pull this off. Michael lets go. 2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected. This is good really good.328

On cue, Sarah Palin’s voice pops into my head. She’s always doing this, showing up when my spirits are lowest. It’s like I have a fairy godmother who hates me. “So,” she asks, “how’s that whole hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?” It’s a line she started using in 2010, when President Obama’s approval ratings were plummeting and the Tea Party was on the rise. And here’s the thing: if you ignore her mocking tone and that annoying dropped G, it’s a good question. I spent the lion’s share of my twenties in Obamaworld. Career-wise, it went well. But more broadly? Like so many people who fell in love with a candidate and then a president, the last eight years have been an emotional roller coaster. Groundbreaking elections marred by midterm shellackings. The exhilaration of passing a health care law followed by the exhaustion of defending it. Our first black president made our union more perfect simply by entering the White House, but a year from now he’ll vacate it for Donald Trump, America’s imperfections personified. The motorcade keeps skidding and sliding. For twenty miles we veer left and right, one close call after another, until we finally reach the South Lawn. Here, too, I have a routine: get out of the van, walk through the West Wing, head to my office across the street. It’s a trip I’ve made countless times before. It’s also one I will never make again. And as I walk past the Rose Garden, the flagstones of the colonnade pressing against the soles of my leather shoes, Sarah Palin’s question lingers in the January air. How has it all worked out?

RESPONSE TO POLITICAL SMEAR TO ROBERT ALLEN New Salem, June 21, 1836 DEAR COLONEL:—I am told that during my absence last week you passed through this place, and stated publicly that you were in possession of a fact or facts which, if known to the public, would entirely destroy the prospects of N. W. Edwards and myself at the ensuing election; but that, through favor to us, you should forbear to divulge them. No one has needed favors more than I, and, generally, few have been less unwilling to accept them; but in this case favor to me would be injustice to the public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining it. That I once had the confidence of the people of Sangamon, is sufficiently evident; and if I have since done anything, either by design or misadventure, which if known would subject me to a forfeiture of that confidence, he that knows of that thing, and conceals it, is a traitor to his country’s interest. I find myself wholly unable to form any conjecture of what fact or facts, real or supposed, you spoke; but my opinion of your veracity will not permit me for a moment to doubt that you at least believed what you said. I am flattered with the personal regard you manifested for me; but I do hope that, on more mature reflection, you will view the public interest as a paramount consideration, and therefore determine to let the worst come. I here assure you that the candid statement of facts on your part, however low it may sink me, shall never break the tie of personal friendship between us. I wish an answer to this, and you are at liberty to publish both, if you choose. Very respectfully, A. LINCOLN.

What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent. More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,” but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office. Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

Conservatism" in America's politics means "Let's keep the niggers in their place." And "liberalism" means "Let's keep the knee-grows in their place-but tell them we'll treat them a little better; let's fool them more, with more promises." With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the "liberal" fox or the "conservative" wolf-because both of them would eat him. I didn't go for Goldwater any more than for Johnson-except that in a wolf's den, I'd always known exactly where I stood; I'd watch the dangerous wolf closer than I would the smooth, sly fox. The wolf's very growling would keep me alert and fighting him to survive, whereas I might be lulled and fooled by the tricky fox. I'll give you an illustration of the fox. When the assassination in Dallas made Johnson President, who was the first person he called for? It was for his best friend, "Dicky"-Richard Russell of Georgia. Civil rights was "a moral issue," Johnson was declaring to everybody-while his best friend was the Southern racist who led the civil rights opposition. How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? How would some sheriff sound, declaring himself so against bank robbery-and Jesse James his best friend? Goldwater as a man, I respected for speaking out his true convictions-something rarely done in politics today. He wasn't whispering to racists and smiling at integrationists. I felt Goldwater wouldn't have risked his unpopular stand without conviction. He flatly told black men he wasn't for them-and there is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom-long before it happened in the North. Anyway, I didn't feel that Goldwater was any better for black men than Johnson, or vice-versa. I wasn't in the United States at election time, but if I had been, I wouldn't have put myself in the position of voting for either candidate for the Presidency, or of recommending to any black man to do so. It has turned out that it's Johnson in the White House-and black votes were a major factor in his winning as decisively as he wanted to. If it had been Goldwater, all I am saying is that the black people would at least have known they were dealing with an honestly growling wolf, rather than a fox who could have them half-digested before they even knew what was happening.

In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.

Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.” It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.

Fourth and finally, I must point out that any philosophical view is unlikely to gain wide acceptance among either philosophers or the wider public. This is especially true of a view like cognitivist misanthropy. Human beings excel at ignoring or denying unpleasant ideas, regardless of strong evidence in their favor—climate change, racism, evolution, heliocentrism, and so on. The idea that one’s own species is bad is especially unpleasant, so it is untenable to think that human beings would adopt the misanthropist view at any appreciable scale. To take an analogy, we might consider the epistemic standards of the home crowd at any sporting event. When judging the quality of the officiating, the crowd relies on the standard of whether or not the officials’ calls favor the home team. The crowd approves of calls that are to the benefit of its favored team while disapproving vehemently of calls that are to that team’s detriment. It matters not to the crowd whether the officials’ calls are, in fact, correct. Even if video replay clearly shows that the home team violated one of the rules of the game, the crowd will repudiate the officials’ “unfair” treatment of its team. I suspect that the public’s estimation of cognitivist misanthropy would be similar, in the unlikely event that anyone outside academia learns of it. The view would be rejected because it is unpleasant or perhaps because it does not fit with preconceptions. In that case, there is virtually no chance for cognitivist misanthropy to cause harm, because there is virtually no chance that it will be accepted by more than a few people. One might object that my analogy is unfair. The behavior of a crowd at a sporting event should not be taken too seriously. It is merely in good fun that the crowd abandons reasonable epistemic standards for a few hours, and surely the individuals who comprise such crowds return to reason when it comes to serious matters. I wish that were true, but the analogy seems apt to me, at least in many arenas of human life. Politics is an obvious example. It is very difficult to look at elections, for example, as involving much in the way of epistemic reasonableness. Support or opposition to some candidate or policy seems to depend on cultural commitments to a far greater extent than considerations of facts, coherence, plausibility, the content of a candidate’s platform, and so on. For instance, when asked by pollsters, a high proportion of supporters of Donald Trump claim to believe many obvious falsehoods. This is puzzling if we assume that the respondents are behaving as genuine epistemic agents who seek to understand reality. How could persons capable of running their own lives believe in absurd conspiracy theories, for example? If we instead assume that the respondents are behaving as supporters of their favored “team,” their behavior makes much more sense. When it comes to politics and social issues, many people simply do not care very much about the truth. Instead, they are invested in promoting the “right” candidate, value, idea, or institution. This is not limited to false views.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

The whole “electability” question usually implies a) there’s a candidate in this field who’s most likely to win, and b) there’s a candidate who appeals to you on a policy level, and c) those candidates are not the same person.

The easiest way to predict what kinds of “electability” stories you’ll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them. Those candidates will be described as electable. Everyone else will get the “polls say” treatment.

When we select a candidate for any office we are not selecting a leader—in fact we are not looking at character traits at all—we are merely selecting a mirror, and the man who can best function in that reflective capacity is the victor. Unfortunately, since this requires the politician not only to try to "mirror" my desires, but also a thousand others, the one who wins is not simply a mirror, but a complex "prism" of sorts, attempting to "represent" a thousand wills at once. The last person he is actually allowed to be is himself. Needless to say, no authentic man—much less a great leader—would subject himself to such degradation. And yet we demand it of all politicians.

The rule of St. Thomas More in his Utopia, although openly utopian, had a rationale which anyone can admit as sound: Anyone who campaigned for a public office became disqualified from holding any office at all. The obvious reasoning here is that men who seek most fervently after a public office are often of precisely that character most prone to corruption by power; that is to say, the man whose desire is strongest for wine is probably the man with whom you'd least want to drink it. A man who so passionately believes himself worthy of an office that he is willing vie for it in the shameless fashion that we see in every electoral campaign, is a man in whom the virtue of humility is only tenuously active. By allowing the holding of offices to become the prizes of popular competition, those men of moderate temper whose constitutions will not allow them to participate are automatically excluded, and in their place a category of most undesirable candidates is ushered in.

Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the nonprosecution agreement read. They’d caught, and they’d killed, and the intention had been to swing a presidential election.

The race that followed constituted one of the great campaigns in American history. A three-way contest with a major party split, it recalled the 1860 election, when the fate of the nation had hung on the outcome. No such momentous stakes rode on the 1912 election, despite [Theodore] Roosevelt's insistent comparison of his new Progressive party with Lincoln's Republicans. Yet the campaign crackled with excitement. The most colorful politician since the Civil War [TR] squared off against the most articulate politician since the early days of the Republic. Everyone recognized that the race was between Roosevelt and [Woodrow Wilson]. [President] Taft remained a candidate solely to spoil Roosevelt's chances.

The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: White feminists did not come get their people. Who are the people of white feminists? Other white women. Until the election of Donald Trump, very few Americans, beyond political scientists and analysts, paid attention to the fact that white women have a long history of voting predominantly for Republican candidates in presidential elections.

In the 2016 elections, white fear ruled the day. Trump used fear to prime the pumps of white American racial resentment by fanning the flames of the birther myth against Barack Obama, claiming that Obama was not a native-born American citizen. For years Trump stoked the fires of the birther myth, continuing even after Canadian-born Ted Cruz became his primary opposition in the 2016 Republican primaries. Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed. All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s exclusion. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group’s demands visible make every other group’s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.

There have been other elections that the religious right has portrayed as tipping-point elections, but never has the movement so unreservedly backed a candidate—not even Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush—with the messianic zeal with which it has enveloped Trump. Never has another political figure been seen as the locus of so much prophecy, and never have so many political leaders openly given themselves over to believing in such things.

Opinions, even majority opinions, don’t create truth—truth is true, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and frequently are. So, if the majority of voters are completely wrong in their support of a candidate, or the majority of legislators are terribly mistaken in their judgment of a law, their majority opinion doesn’t change the fact that they are wrong. It is sheer superstition to believe that if enough people (or, perhaps, enough learned and influential people) think a thing is so, this will make it so. A law may be passed by a majority of legislators who were elected by a majority of citizens, and yet it may very well be immoral and destructive despite the majority’s collective delusions to the contrary. And no group of people, even if they are in the majority, have the right to force an immoral and destructive law on anyone.