Presidential Campaign Quotes

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr. Reagan told an epic story of World War II courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer — that made quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9. Many other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan's public statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction.

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

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42

All White House hopefuls we forewarn: You'll have to prove that you were born. Before Trump hits the state of granite, He must identify the planet Where he first took on human form - A place where blowhards are the norm.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet.

She had been skeptical about change since Obama’s first presidential campaign, when it seemed everyone was eager to change. She knew then, and has know all along, that most people hate to change though they’re happy to see others do it.

Trump Campaign—deleted relevant communications

Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying—even if it’s all stone crazy.

Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned. Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand. By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped, So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.” “Oh, right,” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

Campaign managers and other staffers point to at least three major benefits that would flow from a national popular vote: more public participation, more political moderation, and more presidential legitimacy.

But right now we’re in a place that mirrors the darkest days of our country’s history. On February 10, 2007, some 146 years after Fort Sumter surrendered and the American Civil War began, Barack Obama announced his first presidential campaign in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. In that speech, Obama declared that, like Lincoln, he was out to “free a people” and “transform a nation.” Without question, we’re living in a nation more divided than any since Lincoln’s presidency, and we’ve entered a time and place that may be as dangerous as it was during the Lincoln years.

I’ve spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives . . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

KBR won its coveted role in Iraq while it was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before the 2000 presidential campaign. KBR was later spun off from Halliburton, but by then, it was well entrenched with a virtual monopoly over basic services for American troops in Iraq. At the height of the war, KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence in Iraq larger than that of the British Army.

During the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, associates of the Trump campaign had occasion to meet with or talk to Russians. Some of the encounters were quite brief. None of them constituted criminal activity by Trump or his campaign. Nor did they present a substantial “articulable factual basis for an investigation” by the FBI, as the law demands.

Discord, in large part fueled by Moscow, was the order of the day in several other bordering nations; the invasion of Estonia was unsuccessful, but there remained the threat of invasion in Ukraine. In addition to this, a near–civil war in Georgia, bitterly disputed presidential campaigns in Latvia and Lithuania, riots and protests in other nearby countries.

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,

NO POLITICIAN COULD devote as many evenings to poker and whiskey as had Henry Clay and expect a decorous presidential campaign.

Reagan himself deemed pot as “probably the most dangerous drug in America today” during the 1980 presidential campaign.

It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies.

this man was even more divisive and dishonest than his presidential campaign revealed.

or the need for a Trump 2012 presidential campaign (“This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life, a president who’s not afraid to tell the truth about being a lying asshole!”),

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

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The

Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or actively employed by U.S. intelligence agencies during the cold war and otherwise enjoying the protection of high-placed individuals. Some of them found their way onto the Republican presidential campaign committees of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.

For the Obamacare rollout, Obama worked with the same public relations specialists who also did the publicity for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Celinda Lake and American Environics, the leftist pollster who advised the Obama campaign to make contraception for women one of the central issues in the 2012 presidential campaign, offered data that was useful. But the driving force in developing the strategy behind branding Obamacare was the Herndon Alliance. They’re the ones who came up with the now infamous line, “If you like your health-care plan you can keep it.

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission.

You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?

While Billy Graham welcomed the adoption of the National Day of Prayer, he saw it as merely the beginning of the political and moral transformation needed to save the nation. In late 1951, he insisted that “the Christian people of America will not sit idly by during the 1952 presidential campaign. [They] are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters.

Ailes said they were there for their weekly debate prep. The first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton was a month and a half away, on September 26. “Debate prep?” Bannon said. “You, Christie and Rudy?” “This is the second one.” “He’s actually prepping for the debates?” Bannon said, suddenly impressed. “No, he comes and plays golf and we just talk about the campaign and stuff like that. But we’re trying to get him in the habit.

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

Two crucial developments during the presidential campaign year of 1988 changed climate science forever. The first was the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second was the announcement by climate modeler James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that anthropogenic global warming had begun. An organized campaign of denial began the following year, and soon ensnared the entire climate science community.

Roosevelt's productivity resulted from how he chose to spend his time. He read frequently due to his belief that efficiency did not come from packing in scheduled activities down to every last minute of the day. Rather, it was through the regular feeding of his intellect. Even during the height of a presidential campaign, he packed in nearly four hours of reading a day. He enjoyed works of fiction, science, political philosophy, and history. One can imagine a nervous political aide bursting in his study, telling Roosevelt to put down his copy of Cicero because he was scheduled to begin the day's fourth speech in only two minutes. Researcher Robert Talbert notes that a second explanation for Roosevelt's productivity was his method of splitting up his schedule. His reading times were broken up into 45 minute-increments, divided between three half-hour time slots and three one-hour time slots. There is no way that Roosevelt could have known this, but such a segmented approach to reading is the best way for the brain to retain information. A 2008 study from the University of Illinois found that the brain's attentional resources drop after a long period of focusing on a single activity. Even brief diversions can significantly increase one's ability to focus on a task for a long period of time.

The display, which was called 'Can Democracy Survive the Internet?' was dedicated to a 'global election management' company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica claimed to have gathered 5,000 data points on every American voter online: what you liked and what you shared on social media; how and where you shopped; who your friends were... They claimed to be able to take this imprint of your online self, use it to understand your deepest drives and desires, and then draw on that analysis to change your voting behaviour. The boast seemed to be backed up by success: Cambridge Analytica had worked on the victorious American presidential campaign of Donald Trump; it had also run successful campaigns for US Senator Ted Cruz (twice); and others all across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America.

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.

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

The “evils of faction” theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the “muckrakers” at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.

Not many people in Washington are thinking beyond the 2016 presidential election. It is sometimes argued that an American administration operates strategically for only about six months, at the beginning of its second year—after it has gotten its staff confirmed by the Senate and before the midterms campaign begins.

Last year, it cost the British taxpayers $57.8 million to maintain its royal family,” wrote Robert Keith Gray in Presidential Perks Gone Royal. “During that same year, it cost American taxpayers some $1.4 billion to house and serve the Obamas in the White House, along with their families, friends and visiting campaign contributors.

We do have a grand strategy,” says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them, and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.

Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign used e-mail several times a day in the autumn of 1976. The system they were using was a basic mailbox program, a technology already more than a decade old. But for a political campaign this was a revolutionary stroke in communications. On that basis, Carter was labeled the “computer-driven candidate.” By

Will we ever have a woman President? We will. I hope I'll be around to vote for her--assuming I agree with her agenda. She'll have to earn my vote based on her qualifications and ideas, just like anyone else. When that day comes, I believe that my two presidential campaigns will have helped pave the way for her. We did not win, but we made the sight of a woman nominee more familiar. We brought the possibility of a woman president closer. We helped bring into the mainstream the idea of a woman leader for our country. That's a big deal, and everyone who played a role in making that happen should be deeply proud. This was worth it. I will never think otherwise. This fight was worth it.

The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".

By the 2012 presidential election cycle, their company counted among its clients both the Obama re-election campaign and the campaign of Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Right-to-work laws were originally advanced in language that mirrored precisely Hitler’s attacks on trade unions in Mein Kampf. Nevertheless, their antiunion agenda, explicitly founded upon a desire to maintain white racial hierarchy and prevent solidarity across races and religions, has largely won the day in the United States today. Such antiunion policies paved the way for a presidential candidate running a white nationalist campaign with open nostalgia for the 1930s to sweep to victory across the once proud labor states of the Midwest.

The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives

A Quinnipiac poll in December 2017 showed that 86 percent of Democratic voters believed “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a “return to normalcy.” The possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors.32 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known!

What is my platform? Well, winning. And getting into NYU. “I’ll identify my principles and platform during the campaign kickoff,” I say, which sounds very presidential without actually saying anything meaningful.

Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns. His campaign stumbled from the start and never found a secure footing. He was kept busy explaining his history of derogatory statements about Democrats. “I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers,” he protested. “What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.

My comedy, such as it is, had always been based on taking existing fact and stretching it out to its most absurd possible iteration. But Donald Trump was already doing that. He had been doing it his whole life. By the time he launched his actual, no-joke presidential campaign by gliding down a golden escalator to accuse Mexico of rape, I had realized that there was no joke I could make that could keep up with the long-form improv Trump was laying down every hour of every day. Because of course we now know the no-joke campaign was a joke. He never expected to actually be elected. He just wanted to launch this new, lucrative hate-and-fear-based entertainment product called the Trump Candidacy. But then he became president, and the joke was on him, because he did not want that job. But the joke was still mostly on us, because he is terrible at it, and he makes us all a laughingstock

Obama’s judges share his contempt for the original meaning of the Constitution. He has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress. In a 2001 interview that surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign, he made this very clear: the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren had failed to break “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution,” Obama told the host of a radio show.

The truth is, the Obama administration was so desperate to keep Donald Trump from being elected that his Justice Department, prodded by his CIA chief John O. Brennan, misled the most secret court of the United States. The goal was simple: spy on the Trump campaign to undermine a presidential election. Members of the highest echelon in Obama’s FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice, all conspired to prevent an outsider from breaking the establishment’s stranglehold on the American people.

Such was Frémont’s fame that, in 1856, he was nominated as the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate. The ensuing campaign was “one of the nastiest in the nation’s history.” Indulging in the kind of unbridled calumny that makes modern-day mudslinging seem like the height of civility, Frémont’s adversaries branded him “a secret papist” (a harsh accusation in an era of virulent anti-Catholic bigotry), a bastard, an adulterer, a native-born Frenchman, and the son of a prostitute.

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.

Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing them at best or deliberately misleading them at worst. As I watched the 2016 presidential campaign unfold, the words of Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”13 This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”14 On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”15

Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially, Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.

There was never any evidence that candidate Trump had personal conversations or contacts with Russian government officials or anyone connected with the Kremlin. Indeed, he consistently denied it and no one has come forth to assert that he did. His frustration over being falsely accused of “colluding” with a foreign power during his campaign was understandable. It is why he asked Comey and others to reveal the truth that no evidence existed that would prove otherwise. People who are wrongfully persecuted feel compelled to try to clear themselves of the taint of impropriety. It is the natural instinct in us all. Trump had the same right as a private citizen or public figure or presidential candidate.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It

Each has Republicans losing the Electoral College from 2024 to 2036.2 These trends have been evident for over two decades, and as someone who has sat in the room for five presidential campaigns and tried to figure out how to get a Republican candidate over the 270 mark, the math has been increasingly oppressive. The obvious choice for the party was to expand its appeal beyond white voters. That diagnosis was as obvious as telling a patient with lung cancer to quit smoking. But at the same time, Republicans were taking steps to change the electoral math by making it harder for nonwhites to vote. In this, they were continuing a long tradition of efforts by powerful white politicians to remain in power by suppressing votes.

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

Because many Americans still bartered, Hamilton wanted to encourage the use of coins. As part of his campaign to foster a market economy, Hamilton suggested introducing a wide variety of coins, including gold and silver dollars, a ten-cent silver piece, and copper coins of a cent or half cent. He wasn’t just thinking of rich people; small coins would benefit the poor “by enabling them to purchase in small portions and at a more reasonable rate the necessaries of which they stand in need.” 42 To spur patriotism, he proposed that coins feature presidential heads or other emblematic designs and display great beauty and workmanship: “It is a just observation that ‘The perfection of the coins is a great safeguard against counterfeits.

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.

week before the election, the New Republic’s Morton Kondracke wrote that “it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory.”14 David Broder had written: “There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress.” Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed Reagan ahead of Carter, most were near or within the margin of error, and everyone was predicting a late-night nail-biter. The New York Times poll three days out had Reagan ahead by a single point; veteran California pollster Mervin Field said, “At the moment there is a slight movement toward Carter.” George Gallup said, “This election could very well be a cliffhanger just like 1948.”15

First and most important, our culture was a reflection of the man we served. Obama is at his core a really chill guy and I mean that in the most presidential way. He is a nice guy who expects his team to be nice to one another. This trait comes from how he was brought up. Obama may have been born in Hawaii, but he is “Midwestern Nice,” which comes from his grandparents and their Kansas roots. He engendered loyalty to him and our cause by being loyal to his team. There were many times in the campaign where people, including some of our top donors, wanted the lot of us fired and replaced by people with more “DC experience,” and every time, Obama stood by his team. We didn’t know if we were going to win or lose, but we were going to do it together. If the person at the top of any organization does not reflect the values you want in the culture of that organization, it won’t work.

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 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

The more Trump listened to them, the more he hardened around the notion that he had been robbed, and in the days following the election he would resolve to do what no other sitting president has done in the history of the United States—hold on to power despite the indisputable will of the voters. The next ten weeks would prove to be the most elaborate and extensive campaign to overturn a presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution, all orchestrated from the Oval Office.

The principal justification offered by the Democrats for their campaign against the Iraq War was that “Bush lied” in order to persuade them to support an invasion that was unnecessary, illegal and immoral. This claim was the only way Democrats could explain the otherwise inexplicable and unconscionable fact that they had turned against a war they had supported for domestic political reasons, when an anti-war primary candidate, Howard Dean appeared to be on his way to winning their presidential primary.

My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Contact often has the effect of hardening hostilities, not dissolving barriers. This effect is common in politics. When Jesse Jackson was running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, his percentage of the white vote was consistently highest in those states with the fewest blacks. Whites with the most actual contact with blacks were least likely to vote for him. The same was true in 2008 during Barack Obama’s Democratic primary campaigns. He won the highest percentages of the white vote in states such as Iowa, which has few blacks, and the lowest percentages in states with large black populations. Bernard N. Grofman of the University of California, Irvine has found a reliable political correlation: As the number of blacks rises, more whites vote Republican—and the less likely they are to vote for black candidates. It is whites whose knowledge about blacks is filtered by the media rather than gained first-hand who have the most favorable impression of them. The alleged benefits of diversity seem illusory to the people who actually experience it.

Many times, over the last few years, I have been asked the same question: “Why has Ukraine gained such prominence in world politics?” I first encountered it in the context of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, followed immediately by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its aggression against the rest of Ukraine, with the subsequent dramatic worsening of US-Russian and EU-Russian relations. The same question arose concerning Ukraine’s role in the impeachment process and then again in the American presidential campaign of 2020. My answer was and remains the same. The appearance of Ukraine on the center stage of European and then American politics is not a fluke. Ukraine, the largest post-Soviet republic after Russia and now the object of Russian aggression, has become a battleground in the last few years. Unlike its East Slavic neighbors, Russia and Belarus, Ukraine has maintained democratic institutions and politics throughout the tumultuous years of the post-Soviet transition and oriented itself toward the West in its geopolitical aspirations and social and cultural values.

Good morning, Mr. President,” says Jenny Brickman, my deputy chief of staff and senior political adviser. She ran my campaigns for governor and worked under Carolyn on my presidential run. She is petite in every way, with a mess of bleached blond hair and a mouth like a truck driver. She is my smiling knife. She will go to war for me, when I let her. She would not merely dissect my opponents. If I didn’t rein her in, she would slice them open from chin to navel. She would rip them to pieces with all the restraint of a pit bull and slightly less charm.

But in America, the tilt toward isolationism was gaining momentum and intensity. On September 4, a group of Yale Law students founded the America First Committee to oppose involvement in the war. The organization grew quickly, winning the energetic support of no less a celebrity than Charles Lindbergh, a national hero ever since his 1927 flight across the Atlantic. And Willkie, urged by Republican leaders to do whatever he could to pull ahead in the presidential election, was about to change strategy and make the war—and fear—the central issue in the campaign.

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

If either one or two candidates is dominating the field at the time of the first primaries and caucuses, the voters are superfluous because the victor is already guaranteed. If, however, no candidate is dominant, then the primaries and caucuses will determine the winner. Nonetheless, in recent campaign cycles, that determination has been made earlier and earlier in the process, by fewer and fewer voters, who pick from only a few candidates - the ones who have not already eliminated themselves from serious contention by their weak performances in the pre-primary phase.

HST: Wasn't there a Harris Poll that showed that only 3 percent of the electorate considered the Watergate thing important? McGovern: Yeah. That's right. Mistakes that we made seemed to be much more costly. I don't know why, but they were. I felt it at the time, that we were being hurt by every mistake we made, whereas the most horrendous kind of things on the other side somehow seemed to--because, I suppose, of the great prestige of the White House, the President's shrewdness in not showing himself to the press or the public--they were able to get away with things that we got pounded for.

Starting with a Statement •What a beautiful day.What’s your favorite season of the year? •I was truly touched by that movie.How did you like it? Why? •This is a wonderful restaurant.What is your favorite restaurant? Why? •What a great conference! Tell me about the sessions you attended. •I was absent last week.What did I miss? •That was an interesting program after lunch.What did you think? •Presidential campaigns seem to start immediately after the inauguration.What do you think of the campaign process? •I am so frustrated with getting this business off the ground.Do you have any ideas? •I am excited about our new mayor.How do you think her administration will be different from her predecessor’s? •Your lawn always looks so green.What is your secret? •We’ve been working together for months now.I’d like to get to know you better.Tell me about some of your outside interests. •You worked pretty hard on that stair stepper.What other equipment do you use? •You always wear such attractive clothes.What are your favorite stores? •What a beautiful home.How do you manage to run a house with four children? •I read in the newspaper that our governor has taken another trip overseas.What do you think of all his travel?

Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton. When Russia began to release hacked emails, the networks and the media played along. Russia thus influenced the headlines and even the questions posed in the presidential debates. Content from hacked emails figured in two of the three debates; in the final one, the debate moderator accepted an erroneous Russian recasting of Clinton’s words in a speech, and made of it a central issue.

Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: ‘When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli’ to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, ‘a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’ According to Wright, Obama then told him, ‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.’ But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

Republican strategist Kevin Phillips is often credited for offering the most influential argument in favor of a race-based strategy for Republican political dominance in the South. He argued in The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, that Nixon’s successful presidential election campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to campaign primarily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack rhetoric.54 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained.

Hillary rode her husband’s success to become first lady of Arkansas, then first lady of the United States. Then she won an easy race in liberal New York to become its junior senator. As a senator she accomplished, well, nothing. Then she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Barack Obama, who appointed her secretary of state. Despite extensive travels, Hillary’s achievements as secretary of state are essentially nil. As with Benghazi, most of her notable actions are screwups. In an apparent confirmation of the Peter Principle, however, Hillary is now back as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Hillary is fortunate, not merely in her career path, but also in being the surprise recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars that have been rained on her and her husband both directly and through the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation has raised more than $2 billion in contributions. A substantial portion of that came from foreign governments. Some sixteen nations together have given $130 million. In addition, through speeches and consulting fees, more than $100 million has ended up in the pockets of the Clintons themselves. The foundation, although ostensibly a charitable enterprise, gives only one dollar out of ten to charity. It has also been disclosed that the Clintons have developed a penchant for traveling in high style, and use a substantial amount of donation money on private planes and penthouse suites. The rest of the loot seems to have been accumulated into a war chest that is at the behest of the Clintons and the Hillary presidential campaign.

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

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?

If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

As a campaigner, said Dee Dee Myers, who served as Bill's press secretary, Hillary made the mistake of telling audiences what she felt rather than showing them. "The presidency," said Meyers, "isn't all that powerful, except as the bully pulpit. It comes down to your ability to get people to follow you, to inspire. You have to lead. Can Hillary get people to come together, or does she remain such a polarizing figure?" For an answer to that question, all you had to do was ask half the voters in the United States, who didn't like Hillary. In total contrast to Hillary, Bill was brilliant at politics because (1) he liked people, (2) they liked him, and (3) he treated all politics, -- even presidential politics -- like local politics. He'll show up at your birthday party in suburban Cleveland if he thinks you can be useful to him down the pike," said one of his closest advisers. "Can you imagine the impact that has -- his showing up at a middle-class home out of nowhere? You never forget it, and you tell everybody you know about it. These other guys in politics don't get the power of that kind of thing. The ripple effect it has politically over the long term. Bill does. He's been doing that since he was in high school.

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.

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.