College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.
Stories are “how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on.” Joan Gideon
Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.
What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?
Governing is not a hero’s profession. It is a profession of compromises.
An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.
He talks to people’s grievances, but he doesn’t seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew
Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.
Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.
A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.
For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.
Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.
I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.
(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.
Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.
A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.
Richard Nixon’s conversation was “loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he’d called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.
To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.
Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.
In politics, if you’re explaining, you’re loosing.
Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.
Goldwater’s approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.
Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.
Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.
One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew
Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.
There’s no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.
Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.
Lyndon B. Johnson thought he’d have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas – for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).
Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That’s me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).
Reagan’s emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people’s longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.