A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
Interpretation
Politicians craft their words more for their audience's perception than for genuine beliefs about the subject.
George Will's quote highlights the idea that the language used by politicians is often a strategic tool used to engage and influence their audience rather than a true reflection of their understanding or opinions about the subject matter. This suggests a performative aspect to political discourse where honesty may take a backseat to the need for approval and support from the public.
In practice
During a public speaking event on the role of media in politics, this quote can be used to stimulate discussion on the importance of audience perception.
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.
The true principle of a republic is that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. Representation is imperfect, in proportion as the current of popular favor is checked. The great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed.
The socialism of centralised state control of industry and production, is dead. It misunderstood the nature and development of a modern market economy. It failed to recognise that the state and public sector can become a vested interest capable of oppression as much as the vested interests of wealth and capital. it was based on a false view of class that became too rigid to explain or illuminate the nature of class division today.
The press is supposed to serve as a check on government.
By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
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