Politics & Power Quote by Charles Farrar Browne

A deliberately crooked sentence that winks at you while it picks your pocket. Charles Farrar Browne, better known as Artemus Ward, makes his point by misspelling it: "air" for "are", the grammar sliding off the page like a banana peel placed for the reader and, more importantly, for the politician. The joke isn’t just that the speaker is unpolished; it’s that political speech so often performs polish as a substitute for truth. By presenting himself as linguistically suspect, Ward flips the usual hierarchy. The "respectable" class gets exposed as the less trustworthy one.

The line’s sly engine is the pairing: "I am not a politician" (a claim of innocence) followed by "my other habits air good" (a laughably broad moral alibi). It parodies the campaign biography before campaign biographies were fully industrialized: I may be accused of X, but my character is sound. Ward compresses that entire ritual into one mangled clause, suggesting that public virtue is frequently just a sentence structure - something you can arrange to look sturdy while it’s hollow.

Context matters: Browne wrote during a period when American politics was thick with stump speeches, patronage, and theatrical self-making. His frontier-humor persona let him critique civic hypocrisy without sounding like a scold. The misspelling is a mask, but also a weapon. It says: if politics is a con, the only honest response is to clown it into clarity.