Reform Candidates Quotes

Ironically, throughout his flirtation with the Reform Party nomination, critics in the press openly speculated whether he was indeed a serious candidate for the presidency, or if he was really more interested in promoting a new book. Let me tell you this: Trump was dead serious about running in 2000—and a lot of people were dead serious about voting for him. About

The candidates’ written programme should not be too categorical, since later on adversaries might bring it up against them; in their verbal programme, however, there cannot be too much exaggeration. The most important reforms may be fearlessly promised. At the moment they are made, these exaggerations produce a great effect, and they are not binding for the future.

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

democracy should be a nation in which all people, regardless of their income, can participate in the political process, and can run for office without begging for contributions from the wealthy. Our vision for the future of this country should be one in which candidates are not telling billionaires at special forums what they can do for them in exchange for large contributions. Our vision for democracy should be one in which candidates are speaking to the vast majority of our people—working people, the middle class, low-income people, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor—and discussing with them their ideas as to how we can improve lives for all of the people in this country. One of the truly remarkable aspects of my campaign was that we showed the world that a successful national campaign could be run without a super PAC, and without being dependent on big-money contributions. We received some $232 million from 8 million individual contributions, from 2.5 million people, averaging $27 per contribution. What my campaign showed, and what poll after poll has shown, is that the American people are sick and tired of big money buying elections and democracy being undermined. The time is now for campaign finance reform—real campaign finance reform.

On paper, the people now choose the party nominees for president. And yet, the process seems to have come full circle. [back to party bosses choosing] Voters theoretically get to pick the candidates, but in practice they rarely get the opportunity. In most cases, the contest is over in a few weeks after a burst of activity in a handful of states. How did the reform movement [late 60s, early 70s] get so far away from the plan? The answer is that there was no single plan, nor a single entity hat could craft a system to meet the original intent of the reformers. [To democratize the process]

Parties also must work together in order to succeed. If the coalition splits into competing factions, each pledged to a different candidate, voters become the real power by choosing between the insider-backed candidates. This happened in 2008 but is not the modal pattern.

An important argument of this book, however, is that parties try, via the candidates they nominate and elect, to pull policy toward what their interest and activist groups want, even if that is not what most voters want.

The traditional instrument of party control, the party nominating convention, was eviscerated by reform. Hence, party insiders must now exert themselves by informally coordinating behind a preferred candidate and providing that candidate with the support necessary to prevail in the state-by-state primaries.

On the surface, it therefore appears that voters choose the nominee by choosing convention delegates in their state primaries and caucuses. But the appearance is deceiving because, as we have suggested, party insiders use the invisible primary to coordinate behind a preferred candidate and to endow that candidate with the resources and prestige necessary to prevail in the state-by-state contests.

major threat to the psychoanalyst’s creativity in working with his patient is the patient’s relentless, aggressive attack on the analyst’s work with him. Attacks of this sort produce narcissistic lesions in the psychoanalyst. It is much easier for the analyst to tolerate aggression against any other aspects of his personality or behavior. The training analyst unable to tolerate the narcissistic candidate-analysand’s aggression may foster an unconscious collusion with the analysand, so that the latter’s aggression, particularly the destructive implications of unconscious envy, will not be explored. The

The termination phase of psychoanalysis Working-through of mourning, typical of the termination phase of psychoanalysis, brings forth the working through of the candidate-analysand’s relation to his analyst, and, by extension, to psychoanalysis itself. In my

One way to give labor more power is to make it easier to organize workers by passing labor law reform bills—the perennial campaign promises of Democratic candidates that go perennially unfulfilled. Another is to direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs, stimulate innovation, and raise the pay and status of workers. And a third is to form new institutions for worker power that are better suited to a postindustrial economy, as Michael Lind argues in The New Class War: labor representation on corporate boards, collective bargaining by sector rather than company, and wage boards that set minimum terms for low-wage industries like fast food.

2000, Trump was seeking the Reform Party nomination, a movement which that year was spearheaded by retired professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. The Reform Party originated in the mid-90s as a vehicle for then-candidate Ross Perot to run for President in 1996 and it seemed the perfect vehicle for the politically ambitious, but independently minded, Donald J. Trump just four years later.

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

and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, a set of reforms which became commonly known as “McCain-Feingold” after Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) had sponsored similar legislation in the Senate. The BCRA had made sweeping changes to campaign finance regulations in federal elections, including higher individual contribution limits and the banning of so-called soft money raised by parties in unlimited sums. Soft money was ostensibly for “party-building” activities such as phone banking or party (not candidate) advertising, but in practice, the line between “party” functions and “campaign” activities—that expressly advocated the election or defeat of an individual candidate—was often blurry (Magleby 2010). By the end of the 1990s, donors could write massive checks to aid the campaigns of their favored candidates (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005). The Democratic and Republican Parties combined raised a little more than $85 million in soft money in 1992; in 2002 the combined figure was nearly $500 million (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005, Table 1). By banning such funding, the BCRA was widely seen as an impediment to the ability of moneyed interests to “buy votes” (see: Corrado 2003; Malbin 2003).

The seminal case in American campaign finance is Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), in which the contribution and spending limitations enacted in the early 1970s with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) were challenged on First Amendment grounds. The FECA was a significant, wide-ranging reform that had for the first time created a meaningful regulatory environment in federal campaign finance. The law implemented statutory campaign contribution limits, and also originally mandated spending limitations for congressional campaigns. Moreover, the FECA barred all expenditures made by either private citizens or groups “advocating the election or defeat of (a) candidate” in excess of $1,000 per annum. In Buckley, the Supreme Court held that while contribution limits were constitutional, there could be no prohibition on either individuals or candidates looking to spend their own money to directly communicate a political message. The distinction between contributions and direct spending in Buckley is based on two premises. First, the government has an interest in preventing instances of corruption, or even in limiting public perceptions of corruption. Second, money spent on election communications effectively equates to speech in the modern political realm, so more money spent in this manner is equivalent to more speech. In contrast, the act of contribution by an individual to a candidate, party, or PAC is itself an expressive act.

Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this administration,” President Obama declared back in 2009. Rarely has there been a greater gap between what a politician said and what he did. Indeed, in the mold of Richard Nixon, the White House asserted dubious claims of executive privilege to avoid scrutiny in the Fast and Furious scandal. But Obama is publicly oblivious to the contradictions. At a media awards dinner in March 2016, President Obama scolded the press for enabling a candidate like Donald Trump and suggested it had a greater responsibility than to hand someone a microphone. But as far as Jake Tapper on CNN was concerned “the messenger was a curious one.” He succinctly reviewed the Obama administration’s deplorable record on transparency and openness and concluded: “Maybe, just maybe, your lecturing would be better delivered to your own administration.” Speaking with some passion, Tapper told his viewers: “Many believe that Obama’s call for us to probe and dig deeper and find out more has been made far more difficult by his administration than any in recent decades. A far cry from the assurances he offered when he first took office.” Tapper noted that Obama promised to run the “most transparent administration in history.” “Obama hasn’t delivered,” ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott wrote in the Washington Post in March 2016. “In fact, FOIA has been a disaster under his watch.” Elliott went on to write: Newly uncovered documents (made public only through a FOIA lawsuit) show the Obama administration aggressively lobbying against reforms proposed in Congress. The Associated Press found last year that the administration had set a record for censoring or denying access to information requested under FOIA, and that the backlog of unanswered requests across the government had risen by 55 percent, to more than 200,000. A recent analysis found the Obama administration set a record of failing nearly 130,000 times to respond to public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.1 Tapper closed his broadcast by quoting former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, who helped break the Watergate scandal and said in 2013 that Obama had the “most aggressive” administration toward the press since Richard Nixon.

What America needs more than political reform is political courage—candidates and politicians who are not afraid to risk losing the office they hold to accomplish the greater good. The Founders were not concerned about political survival; they worried about being hanged when they signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause in which they believed so strongly.

The narcissistic lesions absorbed by senior training analysts through the phenomenon of “unhooked telephones” may increase their countertransference reactions to their own candidates and the displacement of these reactions onto other training analysts and candidates, thereby increasing their paranoid reactions toward the institution.

self-protective withdrawal from candidates who are perceived as particularly privileged or untouchable, and “compassionate graduation” of inadequately performing candidates who have remained in training for many years are other typical symptoms of the failure to invest adequate authority in the faculty body.

Pundits on television news programs discuss politics as a horse race or compare the effectiveness of pseudo-events staged by candidates. They do not discuss ideas, issues, or meaningful reform.

Societies that have successfully coped with moral diversity at one level may well be those that can continue expanding their moral networks because they have achieved wider-based, more impartial, justification. In 'climbing the ladder' of wider appeal in a diverse society, they have crafted their rules to accommodate greater diversity. Note here that the very justificatory competency that is critical to a stable shared moral rule also can be employed to undermine the current rule and move to a new publicly justified rule. Justification must be able to perform this destabilizing role of a cooperative moral system is to learn and adapt. A recent analyses such as Haidt's, Stanford's, and DeScioli and Kurzban's have recognized, any adequate account of morality must be able to induce change as well as provide stability. Moral diversity and conflict may be an engine of moral reform, pointing toward a new cooperative equilibrium. On the other hand, we should expect continued conflict on many matters, 'As moral projects climb the ladder to broader audiences (being recast and potentially applied to increasingly broader sets of individuals), any given individual will be bombarded with increasing numbers of candidate moral rules.

Prior to the outbreak of war and the flight of the bishops from the House of Lords and their episcopal posts, a candidate for ordination in the Church of England needed to present himself to a bishop and meet some basic requirements. He needed to be twenty-three years of age to be ordained a deacon, twenty-four years of age to be ordained a priest.8 By 1604, to be eligible for ordination he needed to show proof that he was appointed, or about to be appointed, to some ministerial or academic calling, or that he had held a master of arts degree for five years and resided at one of the universities, or that the bishop himself was willing to “keep and maintain him with all things necessary” until he had an “ecclesiastical living” in which to put the man.9 The ordinand also had to establish that he had satisfactory morals, demonstrated by letters of testimonial, and an adequate education, demonstrated by the completion of a university degree or the ability to give “an account of his faith in Latin, according

As I write this, the Koch brothers, along with the Manhattan Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and America First Legal are financing the attack on racial and queer justice in education by lying to the American public that critical race theory (CRT) is being taught in our nation’s schools and drag queens are grooming children. The Koch brothers don’t simply aim their wealth at model legislation and shifting public perceptions. They also attempt to directly influence electoral results by financing right-wing candidates and movements like the Tea Party.

As far as the Balkans were concerned, the result of the EU’s initial failure was a return to the drawing board and the production of a Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe. This overarching set of policies, designed to strengthen democracy, human rights, and economic reform, was later followed by Stability and Association Agreements between the EU and each of the West Balkan states. This is backed by the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, which provides the West Balkans with some €500 million per year. With the slow stabilization of the region, the EU has been able to offer membership to Croatia; full candidate status to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia; and a provisional status to the others with Stability and Association Agreements, thus providing a strong incentive for local politicians to follow the example of the other Central and Eastern Europeans.

In theory, I’m a Libertarian, but until they find a candidate who didn’t graduate from Hollywood Upstairs Medical College, I declare myself politically agnostic/independent and will hold my nose while I vote a split ticket for whomever I hate the least.

As for mutinies in general,’ said Stephen, ‘I am all in favour of ’em. You take men from their homes or their chosen occupations, you confine them in insalubrious conditions upon a wholly inadequate diet, you subject them to the tyranny of bosun’s mates, you expose them to unimagined perils; what is more, you defraud them of their meagre food, pay and allowances – everything but this sacred rum of yours. Had I been at Spithead, I should certainly have joined the mutineers. Indeed, I am astonished at their moderation.’ ‘Pray, Stephen, do not speak like this, nattering about the service; it makes me so very low. I know things are not perfect, but I cannot reform the world and run a man-of-war. In any case, be candid, and think of the Sophie – think of any happy ship.’ ‘There are such things, sure; but they depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.’ ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it has done me no good. This afternoon I was savaged by a midshipman, and now I am harassed by my own surgeon. Come, Stephen, drink up, and let us have some music.

where Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist most famous for having designed the “shock therapy” reforms applied to the former Soviet Union, had a live-on-video-link session in which he startled everyone by presenting what careful journalists might describe as an “unusually candid” assessment of those in charge of America’s financial institutions. Sachs’s testimony is especially valuable because, as he kept emphasizing, many of these people were quite up front with him because they assumed (not entirely without reason) that he was on their side: Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now . . . I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise. If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core . . . both parties are up to their necks in this. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I have waited for four years . . . five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I’ve have not seen it once.20 So there you have it. If Sachs was right—and honestly, who is in a better position to know?—then at the commanding heights of the financial system, we’re not actually talking about bullshit jobs. We’re not even talking about people who have come to believe their own propagandists. Really we’re just talking about a bunch of crooks.

I commence the act of personal transformation by unreservedly accepting the inevitability of my death. When I thrust aside fear of death, I become a new person, I transmute into a reformed person who is unafraid. The fear of the unknown does not hold me down. Free from attachment to life allows me to embrace personal ugliness and admit to my decided paltriness. I am no longer ashamed of my personal deformities. I embrace my impermanence with a candid shrug of the shoulders and a slight nod of the head of that conveys utter indifference. Now unhampered by awareness of my transience, I can act by using this limited window in time to paint myself for how I, and only I, see fit.

This visit to Syracuse was for a trial, in which Teddy Roosevelt was the accused. Sued by the former head of the state Republican Party, Mr. William Barnes, for libel. The supposed offense that brought him here: while endorsing a nonpartisan candidate for governor more than a year earlier, Roosevelt had railed against two-party political boss rule, claiming Republican and Democratic political bosses had worked together to “secure the appointment to office of evil men whose activities so deeply taint and discredit our whole governmental system.” The result, he said, is a government “that is rotten throughout in almost all of its departments” and that this “invisible government...is responsible for the maladministration and corruption in the public offices” and the good citizens of the state would never “secure the economic, social and industrial reforms...until this invisible government of the party bosses working through the alliance between crooked business and crooked politics is rooted out of the government system.

1848…..they returned to Cologne to begin a new working-class group there. By April it had eight thousand members. Almost immediately, Marx disagreed with its leader Gottschalk over tactics. Gottschalk preferred explosive rhetoric about worker’s rights and arming a people’s militia, communist notions that terrified the middle classes of Germany who were afraid the rights just won would be lost with a revolt by the more numerous lower classes. Marx, however, believed that although the pace of change was frustrating, historical development was slow, and before there could be proletariat rule, there had to be middle-class rule. In any case, a proletariat ‘class’ barely existed in Germany. The number of people who labored with their hands was great, but they were disorganized and did not as yet recognize their own strength. To support the ultimate goal of that group, Marx believed one had to work for middle-class democracy. Viewing upcoming elections as just such an opportunity, he encouraged participation to ensure by democratic candidates over reactionaries who would roll back on reforms. Marx further believed that any newspaper he and his associates published In Colgne had to be democratic not communist, because in Germany democracy was the ideology with the greater immediate potential. If they had chosen to produce an ultra-radical newspaper, Engels said, ‘there was nothing left for us to do but to preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a tiny sect instead of a great party of action.’ The pragmatic approach was not unlike the one Marx had taken during his tenure as editor…