David Remnick Quotes
A politician wants to come off as a happy warrior. To be contemplative seems almost effete, fancy – dispiriting somehow to much of your audience. He [Barack Obama] is not afraid to be this way at all.
He had spent a great deal of time traveling and observing President Barack Obama. While he and many others appreciated the contemplation that Obama gave to serious issues, there were many people who saw it as a lack of courage to act swiftly or an elite intellectual proactice.
David Remnick, Political Writer & Journalist, Editor, The New Yorker, Interview, PBS The Charlie Rose Show, January 20, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is a wonderful historical picture of FDR on his campaign train. Note that the President liked to listen to ideas of many people. Unlike most Presidents he did not have any particular political programs that he advocated in his campaigning. He had no immediate answers to the Great Depression that he had inherited from the Hoover administration. But unlike Hoover, and most Presidents, he was willing to try ideas for which there was no advance evidence of success. If that did not help, he would try something else. He sought ideas from anyone and everyone. His enemies called him a weak leader who had no ideology—no principles but just trying unproven solutions to solve the nation’s critical problems. But it worked and he was elected 4 times—the only President who had served even 3 terms.
Canes-Wrone developed Conditional Pandering Theory. The very popular Presidents do not have to engage in pandering. The unpopular presidents will not be helped much so they have little to gain by using this technique which is personally distasteful to almost all politicians. It is the middle of the road Presidents who tend to make the biggest use of policy pandering.
David J. Remnick is an American journalist and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees. In 2010, he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
