Politics & Power Quote by Herb Kohl

A clean little sentence that tries to shame you out of panic. Herb Kohl’s line works because it frames voting not as a defensive reflex but as a statement of identity: you’re not just picking a candidate, you’re choosing which inner narrator gets to drive. “Hopes” suggests agency, imagination, and a willingness to risk disappointment; “fears” implies you’ve already accepted your opponents’ story about what’s inevitable and what must be prevented at all costs.

The intent is political discipline. It’s a self-instruction (and a gentle instruction to listeners) to resist the most common tool in modern campaigns: threat inflation. Fear is efficient; it narrows attention, rewards simple villains, and makes “the lesser evil” feel like maturity. Kohl flips that script by implying fear-based voting isn’t pragmatic, it’s captivity. In doing so, he offers a moral permission slip to pursue a positive agenda even when the news cycle is engineered to keep you clenched.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to cynicism. If you vote out of fear, you end up endorsing a politics that thrives on permanent emergency. If you vote out of hope, you’re betting that politics can still be about building rather than merely blocking.

Context matters: Kohl, a Midwestern Democrat known more for steadiness than theatrics, is speaking from a tradition that treats civic life as long-term maintenance work. The line doesn’t promise you’ll get what you want. It insists, instead, that you shouldn’t let dread set your priorities.