Chris Christie Quotes
I don't think you run just because political opportunity is there. That's how we wind up with politicians who aren't ready for their jobs.
Ironically, according to Plato and other political philosophers, one of the important qualifications for a leader is that he doesn’t believe that he is ready at the moment. In that sense Christie burnished his star. However, few politicians ever express any public doubt regarding their experience and qualifications.
Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey (Republican), Explaining that he did not think himself ready for the Presidency even though he has the political opportunity to do so, January 16, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Nixon did not make Eisenhower’s first short list, but was finally selected.
This is an important quotation because it was believed by most of the Founding Fathers and the American public until relatively recently. Presidential candidates would not think of publicly campaigning. The view was that anyone who was ambitious for power and authority should not be trusted with it. The idea was first stated by Plato and has been a major view of Western politics since. Many still believe it, but no one has come up with a practical alternative in a large jurisdiction where there is no way to know about the possible candidates without their initiative. Earlier American presidential candidates, although they did not campaign as we know it, got associates to do their campaigning for them. At Presidential nominating conventions, candidates would not even attend. Abraham Lincoln for example never attended the convention at which he got nominated, but he had associates lining up delagates and he was managing their efforts behind the scenes.
Note that early constitutional experts assumed that one of the President’s roles was to be non partisan and control partisanship. Note the phrase ‘prevent the artifices of party’. The early founders were very wary of political parties of ‘factions’ as Madison called them. However, most were extremely partisan although in the Presidency partisanship was toned down by George Washington but after him, partisan ship became the norm.
In the English political system the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch are the same. In the House of Commons, the Front Benches are reserved for the Cabinet Ministers. The argument here is that when politicians become ministers, their career and party success often become more important than the welfare of the country.
This quotation illustrates an interesting phenomenon in American Presidential Politics. There have been Democratic Presidents (FDR and Obama are the most glaring examples) for whom there was vituperative hatred and derision from the conservative Republicans who would frequently refer to them as Socialists and would believe that they were trying to lead the country on the path to socialism. The Presidents always stated that they were opposed to socialism, but to little avail with their conservative haters. But the socialists of the times and even the left wing of the Democratic Party not only did not see them as socialists, but were not very supportive or complementary of their skills and capabilities. Roosevelt reveled in the situation and “welcomed: their hate. Obama was more of a public centrist who tried to avoid the president getting involved in the extreme partisanship of the day.
Although his primary occupation was as a political columnist, he was also a physician and psychiatrist. The desire and ambition for so much power is not typical of most people and the willingness to pay the personal cost to try and attain that position tends to take all Presidential candidates out of the Normal range of American citizens.
Christopher James Christie is an American politician, political commentator, lobbyist and former federal prosecutor who served as the 55th Governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018.
