Leadership Quote by DeForest Soaries

Power rarely retires its own safety net. Soaries is naming the quiet engine of political inertia: institutions are not neutral machines, they are scaffolding built to keep certain people aloft. The line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that broken systems persist by accident or complexity. They persist because they work - just not for everyone.

The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost managerial: "tinker with the apparatus". That understatement is the point. He is not talking about dramatic corruption; he is talking about the banal, procedural choices that decide who gets heard, who gets counted, who gets a fair shot at entry. "Apparatus" makes it sound impersonal, but the subtext is personal: rules, districts, ballot access, committee chairs, donor networks, and bureaucratic chokepoints are designed, maintained, and defended by people with names and incentives.

As a politician, Soaries is also making a self-implicating critique. Coming from inside the arena, it reads less like outsider populism and more like a warning about how quickly reform energy gets domesticated once you benefit from the status quo. The intent is to shift attention from individual villains to structural self-preservation: even well-meaning leaders have reasons to keep the ladder where it is.

In context, it fits the post-2000 American preoccupation with democratic plumbing - election administration, trust, and legitimacy. It's a reminder that "reform" is never just a policy debate; it's a fight over the mechanisms that decide who wins the next one.