Wit & Attitude Quote by David Broder

There is a kind of journalistic deadpan in Broder's line: it flatters democracy while quietly indicting the people most willing to play its game. The joke lands because it reverses the expected virtue. Ambition, usually sold as proof of seriousness, becomes a character flaw - a willingness to do anything, endure anything, perform anything, just to get the keys.

The specific intent is to puncture the romance of electoral politics, especially the modern American version where the presidency requires a marathon of fundraising, glad-handing, polling, and message discipline. Broder isn't arguing that desire is inherently corrupt; he's arguing that the system selects for a certain type of person. If you're eager enough to submit yourself to two years of ritualized humiliation, constant calculation, and transactional relationships, what does that say about your appetite for power - or your comfort with bending yourself (and others) to get it?

The subtext is a warning about incentives. Campaigning isn't just a path to office; it's a training program in avoiding candor. It rewards the candidate who can treat every room like a stage and every sentence like a liability. Broder, a reporter steeped in the campaign trail's theater, is pointing at the psychic bargain: to want the job that badly, you may have to want the wrong things.

Context matters: coming from a mainstream political journalist, this is less revolutionary cynicism than weary institutional critique. It's the sound of someone who has watched the presidency become an audition - and suspects the audition is rigged to produce performers, not presidents.