Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo’s line is a provocation dressed as pastoral common sense: a clergyman insisting that the scandal everyone remembers shouldn’t eclipse the material outcomes many elites forget. Dropping “in spite of all that might be said about Watergate” is rhetorical stage-setting. He acknowledges the moral catastrophe up front, then dares his audience to hold two uncomfortable truths at once: personal corruption and policy benefit can coexist in the same public figure.

The intent reads less like Nixon rehab and more like a test of tribal reflexes. In many educated, liberal church circles, Watergate is shorthand for the whole Nixon story - a neat morality play with clear villains. Campolo punctures that tidy narrative by pivoting to “the poor people of America,” a group that functions here as both moral yardstick and political blind spot. If you’re serious about the Gospel’s preferential concern for the poor, he implies, you don’t get to grade presidents solely on etiquette, scandal, or your own social disgust.

Subtext: Campolo is also scolding his own side. Progressive Christians can become connoisseurs of outrage while outsourcing the harder work of measuring who actually gained (or lost) in wages, benefits, housing, and federal attention. The line pressures listeners to ask whether they want righteousness as symbolism or justice as outcomes.

Context matters: in the post-Watergate era, Nixon’s name became a synonym for crookedness, flattening any discussion of his domestic policy into a punchline. Campolo’s move is to reopen the record not to excuse Nixon, but to complicate the way moral discourse often replaces economic accountability.