Politics & Power Quote by Hubert H. Humphrey

Humphrey is defending a uniquely American kind of accountability: the built-in insecurity of democratic power. “Precarious” does a lot of work here. It frames elected office not as a perk but as a condition of constant exposure, where legitimacy has an expiration date and authority is borrowed, not owned. In that light, a “politician” isn’t merely a self-interested operator; he’s someone structurally forced to listen, adapt, and, yes, fear the electorate’s next verdict.

The second sentence sharpens the point into a warning against the seductions of permanence. By stressing that “we have never established a practice of tenure,” Humphrey draws a bright line between public office and protected institutions like the civil service, academia, or the judiciary. The subtext: democracy should be allergic to lifetime claims on power. If you normalize “tenure” for politicians, you normalize insulation from consequences, and insulation is where corruption, arrogance, and antidemocratic habits breed.

Context matters. Humphrey came of age in the New Deal era, rose through rough-and-tumble party politics, and served during the Cold War and Vietnam years, when public trust and dissent were volatile. His career was marked by both moral ambition (civil rights) and political vulnerability (his 1968 loss and the era’s backlash). The line reads partly as reassurance to anxious voters - you can remove us - and partly as a reminder to fellow officeholders that legitimacy is conditional. Democracy isn’t supposed to feel safe for the people in charge. That’s the point.