Political Savvy Quotes

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

The Trump marriage veered furthest away from my concept of the union — and surprised me most as a student of American politics. Donald and Melania seem to inhabit separate realms and to come together when necessary, when one could not move forward without the other. The presidency was one instance in which they were forced into a joint undertaking. If my choice of language sounds businesslike, that’s because that’s how I’ve come to view the Trumps. Having learned more about each partner’s history, I believe they are two highly ambitious individuals who benefit from their partnership. It’s a transaction: he gains a beautiful woman on his arm, a solid-seeming marriage, a son, and a savvy adviser. She gains wealth and international cachet.

A great leader has to be flexible, holding his ground on the major principles but finding room for compromises that can bring people together. A great leader has to be savvy at negotiations so we don't drown every bill in pork barrel bridges to nowhere. I know how to stand my ground — but I also know that Republicans and Democrats need to find common ground to stand on as well.

Bricks could be used to promote social progress. If we could amass enough bricks to build a prison big enough to cage every citizen, then everybody would be equal. And I think our current political leadership is savvy enough to see this, and is taking steps to implement this as soon as possible. 


At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you believed in God because you were poor and needed something to hold on to. At Harvard, you believed in your good luck or bad luck, in all-nighters, in your political savvy.

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.

For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives

I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive. Over the years these communities acquired political savvy, they organized and became fertile territory for leftist parties. Ten years later, in 1970, they were decisive in electing Salvador Allende and for that reason had to suffer the greatest repression during the dictatorship.

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.

How else could we identify another weirdo or outlier? These symbols intimated a belief system, a way of thinking not just about music but about school and friends and politics and society. It was also a way to separate yourself, to feel bold or try on boldness without yet possessing it. A little inkling of the nonconformist person you could be—you wanted to be—but weren’t quite ready to commit to. I papered my walls with band posters and what little I could find in mainstream magazines about alternative and punk, maybe a picture of Babes in Toyland from Spin or Fugazi from Option. The iconoclast images and iconography covered my room, a jarring contrast to the preppy blue-and-white-striped wallpaper I’d insisted on in elementary school. I resented the parts of myself that were late to adopt coolness, late to learn—I wanted to have always possessed a savviness and sophistication, even though I clearly had neither.

...and this smoke is ours too. We savvy better than anyone how hallow it rings when they cackle about love and freedom. We savvy their obsession with dividing everyone into homie and palonie. We savvy how they'll hurt others in the name of family, security, tradition.

The tech boom was the best thing to happen to Indians. Why are they so good at this tech support stuff? Not just because they’re computer savvy. They’re also polite. That was what collapsed the British empire. They were too polite. Every other colony used violence to attain freedom. The Indians’ form of revolution was awkward silence until the British showed themselves out.

Koch never lied to himself about what he was doing. While some others in the movement called themselves conservatives, he knew exactly how radical his cause was. Informed early on by one of his grantees that the playbook on revolutionary organization had been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch dutifully cultivated a trusted “cadre” of high-level operatives, just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise as it devised savvy maneuvers to alter the political math in its favor. But no war is won with all generals and no infantry. The cause also needed a popular base to succeed, one beyond the libertarians of the right, who were kindred in conviction but few in number. Camouflaging its more radical intentions, the cadre over time reached out and pulled in the vast and active conservative grassroots base by identifying points of common cause.21 Indeed, after 2008, the cadre more and more adopted the mantle of conservatism, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, but seeing advantages in doing so.

Now, when I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I'm not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I'm not talking about a feeling. I'm not talking about having in your heart the way things shuold be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart. I'm talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. This does not mean just changing the men whom you know so that their manners will get better - although that wouldn't be bad either. It has been fifteen years. Their manners haven't gotten appreciably better, even. But that's not what a political resistance is. A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and where people can't. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.

[Adrienne Rich] was one of the only major intellectuals since Freud to assert that homosexuality was anything other than a problem. She is also notable for describing a continuum, like Kinesey's, of lesbian love - a continuum that begins with the intimacy of a mother nursing her daughter and ends with a nurturing, egalitarian love relationship between two women. While this theory eventually contributed to the stifling stereotype that lesbians only cuddle and nuzzle in bed, supporting each other and drinking chamomile tea, Rich was savvy to link same-sex love - so taboo, so unnatural - with a role for women seen as unassailable: being a mother.

This was perhaps most or particularly true for Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, New York’s governor since 1959, when he decided to get tougher on crime. Rockefeller had been a lifelong Republican, but he had routinely found himself in the liberal wing of his own party. Historically, this had benefited him mightily. He was, for example, one of the few of his party to survive the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. But Rockefeller had ambitions beyond New York. A savvy politician, he increasingly realized that the liberal reputation that had earned him such a following in New York was fast becoming a liability—especially if he hoped to win his party’s nomination for the presidency. Throughout the 1960s he had watched Richard Nixon slowly but surely steal his political thunder across the nation. And so, by the close of the decade, Rockefeller had begun to craft a more conservative and more traditionally Republican image for himself. In 1970, Rockefeller made no bones about the fact that he too would be “tough on crime.” This had suddenly become the platform that could get a man elected.

The whole reason I’d written about him so freely was that I never expected to face him in person and could therefore imagine him in ways that gratified my conception of who he should be: a white trash savant imbued with junkyard political savvy. In truth, I found the magazine completely disgusting—as I was meant to, obviously: it had long been the most reviled instance of mass-circulation pornography around and used people like me (shame-ridden bourgeois feminists and other elites) for target practice, with excremental grossness among its weapons of choice. It was also particularly nasty to academics who in its imagination are invariably prissy and uptight—sadly I’m one of this breed too. (A cartoon academic to his wife: “Eat your pussy? You forget, Gladys, I have a Ph.D.”)1 Maybe I yearned to be rescued from my primness, though Flynt was obviously no one’s idea of a white knight. (Of course, being attracted to what you’re also repelled by is not exactly unknown in human history.) For some reason, I tend to be drawn to excess: to men who laugh too loud and drink too much, who are temperamentally and romantically immoderate, have off-kilter politics and ideas. Aside from that, it also happened that in the period during which my ideas about things were being formed, the bawdy French satirist Rabelais was enjoying an intellectual revival in my sorts of circles, along with the idea of the “carnivalesque”: the realm of subversion and sacrilege—the grotesque, the unruly, the profane—where the lower bodily stratum and everything that emerges from it is celebrated for supposedly subverting established pieties and hierarchies. I was intrigued by these kinds of ideas, despite—or more likely because of—my aforementioned primness. Contemplating where one might locate these carnivalesque impulses in our own time I’d immediately thought of Hustler, even though back then I had only the vaguest idea what bodily abhorrences awaited me within its shrink-wrapped covers (as if a thin sheet of plastic were sufficient to prevent seepage from the filth within). In fact, the first time I peeled away the protective casing and tried to actually read a copy, I was so disgusted I threw it away, I didn’t even want it in the house.

When you’re staring up at someone from the gurney, you have no inclination to be a savvy consumer. You have no power. Only hope.

Organizational politics are informal, unofficial, and sometimes behind-the-scenes efforts to sell ideas, influence an organization, increase power, or achieve other targeted objectives.

Women derived significant benefits from the lessons in Betty Lehan Harragan’s Games Mother Never Taught You and Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim’s The Managerial Woman. These books, published in 1977 and 1976, respectively, launched a paradigm shift in female thinking. They and other such writings encouraged women to acquire political savvy, learn the ropes, and beat men at their own games. There is much to be said for political savvy and learning the ropes, but it gets you only so far -- approximately as far as women have gotten.

Professional success demands political savvy, a certain amount of scheming and jockeying, a flair for self-promotion and not letting a no stop you. Women often aren’t very comfortable with that. Perhaps, deep down, we don’t really approve of these tactics. Whatever the reason, we haven’t been very good at mastering these skills, and that holds us back.

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

The IRA created a new branch: the American Desk, also known as the Translator Department. It vetted its new hires for their fluency in American English, which was often slightly imperfect, and their feel for the nuances of American political discourse, which was usually quite impressive. It trained its internet-savvy young employees to understand the issues that divided Americans—gun rights, gay rights, immigration, the Confederate flag and its racist connotations. They learned how to argue online in ways that could

Others quit and stay—letting their intimidation or resentment about politics drain their time, energy, morale, and performance.

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6

She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that’s when people suddenly realized she’s dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look, but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means—nothing. Once you expose that, you lose such credibility. Jared just kind of flits in and does the Arab stuff.

Indeed, the protesters who believed they were seeing the company’s relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber’s customer base is strongly young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.

Ethnically Herod was an Idumean (an Edomite); his ancestors had been forcibly converted to Judaism, and he built for Jerusalem’s God the ancient world’s largest and most magnificent temple. Politically astute, however, Herod also built temples honoring the divine emperor Augustus and made lavish contributions to Gentile cities in or near his territory. Among his other reported politically savvy acts was the execution of members of the old Sanhedrin who opposed him; he replaced those council members instead with his own political supporters. He did not usually tolerate dissent. When some young disciples of religious teachers took down the golden eagle that Herod had erected on the temple, he had them executed.

Modern naturalists must be both biologically and politically savvy, which can be a rude awakening.

A common assumption is that a superintelligent machine would be like a very clever but nerdy human being. We imagine that the AI has book smarts but lacks social savvy, or that it is logical but not intuitive and creative. This idea probably originates in observation: we look at present-day computers and see that they are good at calculation, remembering facts, and at following the letter of instructions while being oblivious to social contexts and subtexts, norms, emotions, and politics. The association is strengthened when we observe that the people who are good at working with computers tend themselves to be nerds. So it is natural to assume that more advanced computational intelligence will have similar attributes, only to a higher degree.

Although liberal by American standards, Europe’s biggest economies were almost all led by center-right governments, elected on the promise of balanced budgets and free-market reforms rather than more government spending. Germany, in particular—the European Union’s one true economic powerhouse and its most influential member—continued to see fiscal rectitude as the answer to all economic woes. The more I’d gotten to know Angela Merkel, the more I’d come to like her; I found her steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind. But she was also conservative by temperament, not to mention a savvy politician who knew her constituency, and whenever I suggested to her that Germany needed to set an example by spending more on infrastructure or tax cuts, she politely but firmly pushed back. “Ya, Barack, I think maybe that’s not the best approach for us,” she would say, her face pulling into a slight frown, as if I’d suggested something a little tawdry

To be regarded as "disabled" in the U.S. is to experience powerlessness on all kinds of levels  -- physical, psychological, political. To be considered disabled is to be put in a supplicant position, the position of the "patient," told to be quiet; if you need something, to ask kindly for it. These are the strictures of disability's Jim Crow. It is really about power: disabled people are considered powerless. Anyone with any savvy is sure to tell others that they don't consider themselves disabled. President Roosevelt called himself a "cured cripple" for that very reason. "If I am talking with a person fairly ignorant of disability rights, and I want to impress upon them that we are legion, I will say, ‘Thirty to 45 percent of the population of this country is disabled,'" professor David Pfeiffer says. "That is a way of getting to the discussion of ‘what is disability'  -- so they will realize that everyone is, or will be, disabled. "But ‘disability' is an ideological term. To name a person as ‘disabled' is to give them an inferior position. In our society people identified as disabled are second-class, third-class, or even worse-class citizens. We live in a constant state of discrimination. Identifying oneself or another person as a ‘person with a disability' is an ideological act. There is no other way to describe it." Which is why not everyone with a functional difference will identify as disabled, he says. Being disabled "is a damning thing.

The middle position is calculated by averaging all claims together, both outrageous and sensible, and the louder the claim, the more it will count. Politically savvy people learn this early and make it their credo; idealists learn this late and refuse to accept it.

My secret pet peeve is my frustration first for all those that fought for our freedom to come back and receive full health insurance but no actual health care and second that unlike the old days pre Obama care when I bought all of Savvy Turtle employees full medical, dental and eye care and handed it to them as a bonus each month to include paying for mine where I could go get what I need and skip the nothing burger red tape of government to post Obama care where all that is nonexistent

I don’t get political with anyone just pointing out that the government in general excuse my French has screwed up health care so bad that it does not matter how successful you become in life you still have to wait on a list and can no longer go around the Government whether you are a Veteran, a successful person or a successful Veteran all of us are in the same boat and we all are heading for the socialist Veterans Administration plan for the whole world to be in

Pass a law to place all of Congress, Government employees and Bureaucrats into the same socialist health care plan with the American people and see how long socialist health care lasts in America as it’s fine to do it to your own people but once you receive the same porridge as the people you serve you no longer want the bill you passed into law

Thought about going to Mexico and coming back without papers many of us vets say it will be a lot faster to get treated then to wait in a 5 year waiting list while also it will change to a 100 year waiting list if the whole world joins healthcare for all as it’s a direct clone of the VA failure, Vets Choice is good but cannot survive unless we remove the VA as the middleman

No matter what political party you are with we all should not take politics with us everywhere we go making everything in life politically charged, We all need to take the politics everywhere idea and throw it so far down in the ocean that not even Jacques Cousteau will be able to find it

At the top, elected officials engage in “logrolling” and the exchange of favors that makes politics the place of strange bedfellows, indeed. The out-of-character vote of one of our elected representatives on a bill or measure can often be understood as a favor returned to the bill’s sponsor. Political analysts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson’s ability to get so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration. Even members of congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the proposals were voting for them. Close examination by political scientists has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the House and Senate. As President, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.

BDS on college campuses is a savvy, well-funded political operation whose sponsors and organizers include groups and individuals with ties to Islamist agendas. I didn’t make this up. A much smarter person than me said this in his sworn testimony in front of the United States Congress. Here is Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, former terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury: The overlap of former employees of organizations that provided support to Hamas who now play important roles [in the BDS movement]… speaks volumes about the real agenda of key components of the BDS campaign.10 Schanzer, now senior vice president at the Washington, DC–based think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is an expert in uncovering financial ties that are designed to be hidden. In his testimony, Dr. Schanzer describes a head-spinning web of financial and personal connections between BDS and supporters of terrorism. The BDS US campus operation represents a savvy rebranding of the Palestinian cause to make it more palatable—and, you know, less terror-y—for the American people. Key figures in the BDS movement come from a particularly uncompromising strain of Palestinian nationalism that calls for a State of Palestine to stretch from the river to the sea (yes, without Israel). Apparently, when they saw that their message was not resonating with Western society (not surprisingly, I would say), they decided to pivot and started pouring their resources into American colleges in order to influence future leaders and voters in America and Europe. “Investing in the future they are,” as Yoda would say.

What’s Slipping Under Your Radar? Word Count: 1096 Summary: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. Keywords: Dr. Karen Otazo, Global Executive Coaching, Leadership Article Body: Ben, a high-level leader in a multi-national firm, recently confessed that he felt like a bad father. That weekend he had messed up his Saturday daddy duties. When he took his son to soccer practice, Ben stayed for a while to support him. In the process, though, he forgot to take his daughter to her piano lesson. By the time they got to the piano teacher’s house, the next student was already playing. This extremely successful businessman felt like a failure. At work, one of Ben’s greatest strengths is keeping his focus no matter what. As a strategic visionary, he keeps his eyes on the ongoing strategy, the high-profile projects and the high-level commitments of his group. Even on weekends Ben spends time on email, reading and writing so he can attend the many meetings in his busy work schedule. Since he is so good at multi-processing in his work environment, he assumed he could do that at home too. But when we talked, Ben was surprised to realize that he is missing a crucial skill: keeping people on his radar. Ben is great at holding tasks and strategies in the forefront of his mind, but he has trouble thinking of people and their priorities in the same way. To succeed at home, Ben needs to keep track of his family members’ needs in the same way he tracks key business commitments. He also needs to consider what’s on their radar screens. In my field of executive coaching, I keep every client on my radar screen by holding them in my thinking on a daily and weekly basis. That way, I can ask the right questions and remind them of what matters in their work lives. No matter what your field is, though, keeping people on your radar is essential. Consider Roger, who led a team of gung-ho sales people. His guys and gals loved working with him because his gut instincts were superb. He could look at most situations and immediately know how to make them work. His gut was great, almost a sixth sense. But when Sidney, one of his team of sales managers, wanted to move quickly to hire a new salesperson, Roger was busy. He was managing a new sales campaign and wrangling with marketing and headquarters bigwigs on how to position the company’s consumer products. Those projects were the only things on his radar screen. He didn’t realize that Sidney was counting on hiring someone fast. Roger reviewed the paperwork for the new hire. It was apparent to Roger that the prospective recruit didn’t have the right background for the role. He was too green in his experience with the senior people he’d be exposed to in the job. Roger saw that there would be political hassles down the road which would stymie someone without enough political savvy or experience with other parts of the organization. He wanted an insider or a seasoned outside hire with great political skills. To get the issue off his radar screen quickly, Roger told Human Resources to give the potential recruit a rejection letter. In his haste, he didn’t consult with Sidney first. It seemed obvious from the resume that this was the wrong person. Roger rushed off to deal with the top tasks on his radar screen. In the process, Sidney was hurt and became angry. Roger was taken by surprise since he thought he had done the right thing, but he could have seen this coming.

It was my first time back in Pakistan since 9/11, and I found a country very different from the one I remembered. Any love or admiration for America was gone. In its place was an irrational paranoia that passed for savvy political consciousness. Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t.

I'm convinced that faithful remembering is critical to faithful living, I'm distressed by the "historylessness" that generally characterizes American Christians. Among its other costs, our historical amnesia contributes directly to our dysfunctional engagement with contemporary politics, a pattern distinguished chiefly by its worldly pragmatism and shallowness. I fear we are giving the culture reason to view followers of Christ as simply one more interest group, one more strategically savvy voting bloc willing to trade political support for political influence.

When the instincts to virtue signal are combined with curiosity about science, open-mindedness about values and viewpoints, rationality about priorities and policies, and strategic savvy about ways and means, then wonderful things can happen.

Millennials are young, tech-savvy, and—increasingly—non-white. This combination of changing socio-demographic factors, their population size, and their tendency to want everything filtered through a digital interface means that they will leave an indelible mark on society. Enabled by mobility and digital connectivity, the sum total of these changes represents the emergence of a new social contract with vast implications for the social, economic, and political environments whose impacts will be as significant and far-reaching as that of the printing press of the Industrial Revolution. I refer to these changes as a whole as the “Untethered Society.” I define coming untethered as a condition in which ties to people, places, jobs, traditional processes, and organizing structures in society—like churches and political parties—are being weakened, broken, and displaced by digital hyperconnectivity.

Whether or not Constantine’s conversion to Chris-tianity was sincere, the Edict of Milan was a savvy political strategy.

I have been asked many times what an "outstanding manager" has in his personality? I reflected based on my tenure with some outstanding managers of the country and my sense tells me that he has razor sharp thinking, eloquent speaking ability, free-flow writing ability, quick in calculating/computing (numeric), Tech-savvy, pleasingly interactive, polite conversationalist and agile in navigating in the corridors of office floors/markets based on emerging business needs.

the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser.

This worldview breeds two political desires, and most populists are savvy enough to embrace both. First, populists claim, an honest leader—one who shares the pure outlook of the people and is willing to fight on their behalf—needs to win high office. And second, once this honest leader is in charge, he needs to abolish the institutional roadblocks that might stop him from carrying out the will of the people.

Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power. Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved. Into the vacuum of ‘leaderlessness’ almost anything could appear. No matter how networked, ‘transgressive’, social media savvy or non-hierarchical a movement may be, it is the content of its ideas that matter just as much as at any point in history, as Evgeny Morozov cautioned at the time. The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right.

Both of them knew that the Christian Civic League of Maine was not only vehemently anti-gay and anti-transgender, they were politically active and media savvy.

A Roman governor appointed Joseph Caiaphas as high priest, and he was politically savvy enough to remain in office from AD 18 to 36. (He is well documented in Josephus, and some scholars believe that his ossuary has been found.) Josephus, the Pharisees and the Essenes all report the abuse of power in this period at the hands of the aristocratic priests.

For this reason, I must say in an aside, I worry about the recent surge of power among U.S. Christians, who seem to be focusing more and more on political means. Once Christians were ignored or scorned; now they are courted by every savvy politician. Evangelicals especially are identified with a certain political stance, so much so that the news media use the terms “evangelical” and “religious right” interchangeably. When I ask a stranger, “What is an evangelical Christian?” I get an answer something like this: “Someone who supports family values and opposes homosexual rights and abortion.