Daily Inspiration Quote by Rich Lowry

Lowry’s line works because it pretends to be an observation about comedy while quietly policing what kinds of public flaws we’re allowed to find “human.” Bill Clinton’s “out-of-control appetites” gets cast as the familiar American story of the charismatic guy undone by excess; even the mockery carries a trace of indulgence. The joke is that he’s too alive. Then Lowry pivots: Hillary’s supposed sin isn’t excess, it’s discipline. The ridicule, he implies, targets her for refusing messiness-for never letting the audience see her slip.

That contrast is doing ideological work. It recodes gendered expectations as neutral cultural commentary. A male politician can be lampooned for impulse and still read as relatable; a female politician, in this framing, is suspect when she appears controlled, strategic, impermeable. “Lets nothing be out of control” doesn’t just mean competent. It suggests coldness, calculation, an unseemly hunger for mastery. The subtext is that her self-management is not a virtue but a kind of moral and emotional withholding.

Context matters: the Clintons were, by the time Lowry wrote in this idiom, already archetypes in American political storytelling-the philandering husband and the hyper-competent wife. Lowry taps a ready-made sitcom dynamic and upgrades it into a political critique: Bill’s appetites are a personal failing; Hillary’s control is framed as a character flaw that doubles as a warning about power. The sentence’s neat symmetry makes the bias feel like balance. That’s the trick.