QOTD: Honest Abe
by digby
He’s talking about the power of persuasion:
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
I don’t think anyone believes this anymore — we are told that our government structure means that it doesn’t matter much what any statesman or leader believes or says and that a president has very little power to persuade.
But I still disagree. I think the real power of any leader lies in his ability to mold public sentiment and that it’s obvious that presidents do this all the time, for better or worse. But unless you actually look at what they’re saying and judge public sentiment by criteria that go beyond the latest polling numbers, you’ll never see it. And you wind up with a view of how the world works based solely on transactional politics — which is an extremely one-dimensional way to see it.
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