Jeff Shesol Quotes

It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.

Some politicians that I've seen have been brilliant with the public. They almost speak with the skill of an actor.

Since the rise of television in the 1950s, the media have become the central forum for American politicking, and increasingly today that role is being played by the blogosphere. With the blogger and the viewer replacing the pamphleteer and the parader, politicians focus on marketing themselves and their causes to passive consumers rather than mobilizing passionate soldiers. The new language of politics sounds like this: Spin doctors stage photo ops as pollsters survey voter preferences, spawning celebrity candidates.

I think that perhaps the classic propagandists of the - in the Second World War was Winston Churchill. He was extremely skilled and adept at it.

If it were the Clinton people, they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security, which the needle is not moving on.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

President Bush has consistently used rhetoric, and that is not convincing given his past record.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

The American people don't believe politicians. They don't believe business leaders or Hollywood celebrities or athletes or other supposed role models. And they certainly don't believe the news media.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

The average voter has to hear a point seven times before it registers.

President Clinton does not use polls to reach positions. He takes positions and then uses the polls to survive the experience.

America needs some honest men who dare to say what they think, not what they think people want them to think.

The extreme scarcity of political leaders of any caliber is owing to the fact that they are called upon to decide at any moment, and in detail, problems which the increased size of societies may well have rendered insoluble.

When politicians try to govern by raising a wet finger to the wind or on the basis of public opinion polling, the public gets to think that all leaders are interchangeable.

The Presidency, even to the most experienced politicians, is no bed of roses; and Gen. Taylor like others, found thorns within it. No human being can fill that station and escape censure.

I don’t think that politicians should use words like ‘global economic crisis’ because some times when you do, you make a crisis where there was none before.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

Democracy in the United States takes politicians who are reasonable in private and it churns them through a public process that is almost tailor-made to undermine their virtues. Perpetually kissing up to the voters destroys the leadership qualities the voters are looking for in the first place: tranquility of spirit, independence of mind and a sensitivity to the contours and complexity of reality.

The world of messaging is the world of campaign consultants, of politicians, who are like trained seals who are given their message and then they perform. I’m not into that.

To some extent, it is [that] everybody is resistant to change. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody that was opposed to the smoking ban … All of Western Europe followed New York City. Many of the states around here did. Every major city, including in the tobacco-growing states in the United States, did. Brazil is smoke-free. Mexico City is smoke-free. All of France, Italy, Spain, England—they’re all smoke-free. It takes a while. Leadership is about doing what you think is right and then building a constituency behind it. It is not doing a poll and following from the back. If you want to criticize the political process—and it’s probably true throughout history, and certainly not just in the United States—I think it’s fair to say, in business or in government, an awful lot of leaders follow the polls.

A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won't be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They'll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates

Analysts can choose the problems that they want to study whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.