Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter LippmannRead
The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Interpretation
Voters often seek guidance on their desires, especially in times of uncertainty.
Walter Lippmann suggests that in times of confusion or trouble, voters do not just seek information about their immediate wants, but rather they desire leadership that can help them articulate those wants. He highlights the paradox in political communication where the need for clarity and direction often overshadows the data-driven analysis of public opinion.
In practice
In a political speech when discussing the challenges faced by the electorate.
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
The news and the truth are not the same thing.
There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.
There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.
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