Wishing Candidates Success Quotes

To achieve a goal, a dream, a wish, you must plan it out for success!

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

Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

Moreover, what is doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; therefore, the life of those who work hard to gain, must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New engrossments take the place of the old, hope leads to new hope, ambition to new ambition. They do not seek an end of their unhappiness, but change the cause. Have we been tormented by our own public duty? Then those others take more of our time. Have we ceased to labor as job candidates? We then begin to work for others. Have we got rid of the troubles of a prosecutor? We then find ourselves before a judge. Has a man ceased to be a judge? He then becomes president of a court. Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or of unhappiness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We shall always pray for leisure, but never enjoy it.

In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference is, more often than not, the candidate who wins. This is a crude and sweeping simplification, but nevertheless it is usually true. Understood the way I have defined it, populist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades. Another reason we know that anti-elitism works is because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting—you might say “stealing”—the anti-elitist themes I have described. From the days of Nixon to those of Trump, the conservative revolution happened not because Americans love polluters and disease but because Republicans sold themselves as a party of protest against the elite. Most of the time it was the cultural elite that was the target: the prideful people who make movies and write newspapers; who love blasphemy but hate the flag. The point is so easy and so obvious that it’s hard to understand why it’s been so difficult for Democratic politicians to get it: Populism is the supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics. On the other hand, the impulse to identify your goals with the elite—with any elite, even a moral one—is a kind of political death wish. In a democracy, a faction that chooses to go about its business by admiring its own moral goodness and scolding average voters as insensitive clods is a faction that is not interested in winning.