Madeleine M. Kunin Quotes
When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.
Kunin, Madeleine M. Living a Political Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Essentially Trollope claimed that English political parties are by their very nature, conservative, in the sense that they tend to resist great change. This has tended to be true in America and other democracies, but there are a number of exceptions. Where political parties are totally unsuccessful, they have little to lose. Likewise, when a political party becomes overwhelmingly dominant, it tends to overreach and try and make ideological change. However when there is true contest among the parties, they tend to be conservative in the sense that even if they are liberal parties, they do not move in extreme ways.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the provisional government appointed him as Ambassador to the United States. However, the provisional government was supplanted when the Bolsheviks took over. Not enamored of Communism, he stayed in the United States with many other Russian refugees.
There had just been a terrorist bombing in New York City and a suspect had been arrested. The suspect was a naturalized American citizen who had immigrated from Afghanistan. One of the then presidential candidates, Donald Trump, took to the airways and the internet to use the incident to support his view of prohibiting Muslim Immigrants and visitors entry into the United States. The governor was asked if it was appropriate for a presidential candidate to politicize the event.
Madeleine May Kunin (born September 28, 1933) is a Swiss-born American diplomat, author and politician. She served as the 77th Governor of Vermont from 1985 until 1991, as a member of the Democratic Party. She also served as United States Ambassador to Switzerland from 1996 to 1999. She was Vermont's first and, to date, only female governor as well as the first Jewish governor of Vermont. She was also the first Jewish woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state. Kunin is currently a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont.
