Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Starr

Kenneth Starr’s line reads like a compliment, but it’s really a lawyer’s instrument: soft, elastic, and strategically deniable. “I think” lowers the evidentiary bar. He’s not testifying; he’s opining. “Inspires” flatters the President while implying a kind of gravitational force around him, an almost involuntary pull. And “tremendous affection and loyalty” is tellingly emotional language for a figure whose job description is institutional, not intimate. Starr frames political support as a feeling - warm, personal, protective - the exact kind that can survive facts, scandals, even impeachment.

The subtext is practical. In the impeachment era, Starr understood that the battle wasn’t only over conduct; it was over public tolerance and partisan cohesion. By emphasizing “a wide range of people,” he’s laundering a factional reality into a national one: this isn’t just the base, it’s America. The phrase works rhetorically because it preemptively casts critics as out of step with a supposedly broad consensus. If loyalty is “wide-ranging,” then opposition starts to look like fringe obsession rather than civic scrutiny.

Context sharpens the edge: Starr was not a neutral commentator but a central actor in the machinery that tested presidential legitimacy. Coming from him, the remark carries an implicit warning as much as admiration. The President’s power isn’t only constitutional; it’s social. Cross him and you don’t just face an office - you face a network of attachment. In a democracy, that’s both a strength and a pressure point: affection can be a mandate, but it can also be a shield.