Politics & Power Quote by Theodore C. Sorensen

Running away from liberalism is framed here as a kind of political self-amputation: Democrats, Sorensen suggests, tried to survive by shedding the very label that once gave them purpose. The stumble in the middle - "Liberalism, uh" - reads less like uncertainty than a deliberate pivot from abstraction to lineage. If the word has become toxic in the focus-group era, he answers with a roll call of presidents and martyrs: Roosevelt, Truman, the Kennedys. It is a rhetorical jujitsu move, swapping an ideology that polls badly for a memory that still glows.

Sorensen's context matters. As JFK's speechwriter and counsel, he is defending not just a platform but a style of governance: activist government with moral confidence, internationalism without swagger, reform that feels like national renewal. By invoking FDR and Truman, he ties "liberalism" to competence under pressure (Depression, world war, the early Cold War). By pairing John and Robert Kennedy, he adds youth, tragedy, and unfinished business - liberalism as a promise interrupted, not a creed exhausted.

The subtext is a rebuke to Democratic triangulation: stop apologizing for believing in government, stop treating "liberal" as a slur that must be dodged. Sorensen isn't naive about the word's baggage; he's arguing that a party loses coherence when it sprints away from its own best story. The intent is restorative, but also tactical: voters may distrust labels, yet they still recognize eras when politics aimed higher than mere management.