Eric Liu Quotes
Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.
Liu, Eric, and Nick Hanauer. The True Patriot: A Pamphlet. Sasquatch Books, 2007.
“Waving the bloody shirt” was a term that some Southerners accused Northern post Civil War politicians of inflaming Northern public opinion by relating incidents of Northerners who wanted to help uphold the equal rights of Blacks in the South and were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan and waving a bloodstained shirt belonging to the dead martyr. There never was an incident that could be documented of actually waving a bloody shirt. But many Northern politicians related events of Southern lynchings and other assaults on Blacks and Whites who were guilty of nothing but claiming lawful rights for Negroes. Northerners who remembered the Civil War and the atrocities and war crimes of Andersonville and Quantrill’s Raiders when they heard these speeches were outraged and angry. This created much anti-Southern attitudes in the North and the West some of which exist to this day.
In 2012, the Republicans were a very narrow party; almost all Republicans were quite conservative. In contrast, the Democrats had conservatives, liberals and socialists at the same time. When the Democrats accomplished something, if they talked much about it, the conflicts within the party would be ripped open and there would be democrats attacking the democratic accomplishments along with the Republicans. Historically, it was not always such. In the 1940s for example, it was the reverse where the Republicans were generally more quiet about their accomplishments than the Democrats who were divided only on race relations and civil rights and unified on most else.
He was explaining why his candidate, Earl Warren, refused to debate his opponent, incumbent governor Olsen, in 1942. Later he was one of the Nixon advisors who was vehemently opposed to Nixon debating Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.
Eric P. Liu (born 1968) is a Chinese American writer and founder of Citizen University. Liu served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy at the White House between 1999 and 2000. He served as Speechwriter and Director of Legislative Affairs for the National Security Council at the White House from 1993 to 1994. President Obama nominated him in January 2015 to serve on the board of directors of the federal Corporation for National and Community Service and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate; his term expired in December 2017.
