Lester Holt Quotes
Race has been a big issue in this [presidency] campaign [2016].
Holt, Lester. "First Presidential Debate." The Commission on Presidential Debates, 26 Sept. 2016.
Mrs. Roosevelt, on her own, would criticize the ethics of certain campaign techniques and would criticize them. However she doesn’t say publicly which party she was chastising—her Democrats or the Republicans. And she starts by honestly stating that both parties do this and she tells the readers that it is the campaign headquarters who go to these extremes. Her technique was very effective in that the political operatives who released the sleazy material knew who they were, and realized that if they kept doing it, people would find out that they were the villains. Very often they just stopped, and that was what Mrs. Roosevelt wanted. She wrote this two months before the Presidential elections without every checking with the campaign staff and leaders who read it in the newspapers every day like everyone else. Needless to say that they were not happy, but the President was fine with it and she has had more independence of action and writing than any First Lady in history. She even disagreed with the President slightly sometimes, but usually she was very supportive of FDR and the New Deal. It is hard for us years after to realize that she had a newspaper column published every day in papers throughout the country, she had a regular radio show. Her views reached more Americans every day than the President’s and the campaign staff’s. Her husband was elected to 4 terms—more than any other American President, and yet until Hillary Clinton, no first lady every had gotten overtly involved with public campaigning and political communications, and Mrs. Clinton was nowhere near as active or independent as Mrs. Roosevelt.
In 2012, the Republican party had shifted to the right and was split between two factions. None of the 4 leading candidates had the support of a majority of the activist Republicans who vote in Primary elections. The then started to vie with each other for the most conservative elements of the party and did so by attacking the other candidates, making moral pronouncements and attacking President Obama. None of them offered any positive programs or solutions to the problems they claimed existed, and the attacks on the others were always that they were “really not conservative” and “could not get elected.” The result was that all the candidates negatives rose.
The “talk” was some Protestants concerned that JFK, a Catholic, was a candidate for the presidency.
Lester Don Holt Jr. is an American journalist and news anchor for the weekday edition of NBC Nightly News and Dateline NBC. On June 18, 2015, Holt was made the permanent anchor of NBC Nightly News following the demotion of Brian Williams. Holt followed in the career footsteps of Max Robinson an ABC News evening co-anchor and Holt became the first African-American to solo anchor a weekday network nightly newscast.
