“A steady diet of political infighting tends to coarsen, and ultimately to cheapen, most participants. They approach politics as reasonably honorable citizens, and by imperceptible degrees it sucks them into its vortex. The plainly right shades into the nearly wrong; the inexcusable slowly becomes the barely permissible. At last the best of men become very nearly the worst, and behave—usually in the name of some long-forgotten virtue—in ways that would shame a pain-crazed rattlesnake. But here and there, now and then, some individual defies the pattern, and succeeds in the teeth of the seemingly universal Gresham’s Law of politics. A Taft, a Goldwater, a Bracken Lee makes the truth pay off, for a change, and gladdens the hearts of millions who supposed that honesty could never again win an election.”
Source: Special Counsel (1968)
Keywords: governance,political-strategy
