Politics & Power Quote by Gregory Nunn

The line lands like locker-room trash talk disguised as political commentary: a compliment with a sting. Calling a liberal "right most of the time" grants competence and even moral direction, but the follow-up - "right too soon" - reframes that correctness as impractical, premature, maybe even socially annoying. It’s a neat rhetorical juke: the speaker keeps the high ground of fairness while still inviting the audience to roll their eyes at the person who keeps predicting the future before everyone else is ready to live in it.

From an athlete, the subtext hits differently than it would from a columnist. Sports culture prizes timing, rhythm, and playing the moment. Being early can be as fatal as being wrong: jump offside, mistime a pass, peak before playoffs. Nunn’s framing borrows that sensibility and applies it to ideology. It suggests liberals lose not because their ideas are bad, but because they misread the clock: the electorate, the culture, the patience of the room.

There’s also a quiet defense of the status quo embedded in the joke. If someone is "right too soon", then resistance isn’t ignorance; it’s presented as normal pacing. It flatters the skeptics as realists and casts reformers as chronically out of sync. The quote works because it captures a familiar political pattern - yesterday’s radical becomes today’s consensus - while still giving listeners permission to dismiss the radical in the present. It’s less an argument than a cultural shrug that doubles as a warning: being right isn’t enough; you have to be legible on the timeline.