Politics & Power Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg gives the politician a magician's kit and dares you not to laugh - because the joke lands too close to the truth. The three hats sketch a whole career in miniature: ambition, performance, and post-election spectacle. "Throwing into the ring" is the old ritual of candidacy, a hat-toss made to look folksy and brave. Sandburg hears the clang of theater in it: an entry cue, not a moral commitment.

The second hat - "talking through" - turns rhetoric into ventriloquism. It's not just that politicians speak a lot; it's that the hat becomes a prop that lets them project authority while staying personally insulated. Talk happens through something, not from someone. Responsibility is padded, like felt.

Then comes the clean twist: if elected, the hat is for "pulling rabbits out of". Sandburg isn't attacking policy creativity so much as the expectation of miracles once the votes are counted. Campaigns sell certainty; governing delivers constraint. The rabbit is the promised job, the fixed economy, the ended war - conjured on demand. That "if elected" tag is key: the magic is deferred, always just past the next ballot.

As a poet who lived through industrial upheaval and the rise of mass media politics, Sandburg understood how democracy can drift into pageantry. The line works because it treats politics as craft and con: the same object serves sincerity, spin, and sleight-of-hand. You come away not only suspicious of politicians, but also of the audience that keeps asking for rabbits.