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Quote by Jeffrey A. Miller

“Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS.”

Quote by Jeffrey A. Miller

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Jeffrey A. Miller

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“No voter wants to believe he doesn’t really matter, so he buys into the idea that there are two substantively different parties frantically competing for his attention, the ideological fate of the country hanging on his decision every few years. It flatters the average citizen to think that way. The reality is that the dominant characteristic of our political system is the unchanging nature of the political consensus—while the two parties agree about most all of the important things, they disagree violently about the inconsequential stuff, providing the fodder and the drama for an endless political “struggle” that plays itself out in entertaining fashion every couple of years.”

“The Thatcher government aimed for much more: a reshaping of the country's entire political economy. But there was no organised body of thought or practice about how to do such a thing. British politicians at that time had no successful post-war role models of strategic competence. Whatever their political gifts, ministers had no formal training for executive work. There was no political equivalent of the business school, no literature to help them think about the discontinuity of which even the dimmest politicians and businessmen were becoming aware. There was not even a common language for the task they had undertaken to enable ministers and their advisers to think and communicate with sufficient rigour and without misunderstandings, instead of muddling along with an armoury of empty phrases. And so, to start with, most of them had to rely, like their predecessors, on political history, traditional debating style and a collection of institutional assumptions. I suspect that, now things are more or less normal, all this will remain an immutable feature of British democratic government.”