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.
Damn your principles! Stick to your party.
There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.
No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional.
In the end, North Korea's conduct may change only when its leadership does.
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