Politics & Power Quote by Edmund S. Muskie

Muskie is trying to do something unfashionable in campaign season: normalize the temperature without denying the fire. By conceding that “anger and exaggeration” are baked into electoral combat, he acknowledges what everyone can see and feel, which buys him credibility. It’s a shrewd preemptive move, too: if you admit the system’s flaws out loud, you take away the opposition’s ability to weaponize them against you. The sentence is a pressure-release valve disguised as reassurance.

The pivot word is “Yet.” It’s doing the heavy lifting, redirecting the listener from the theatre of campaigns to the sturdier idea of democratic procedure. “On the whole” is classic Muskie moderation: a lawyerly qualifier that refuses both utopian praise and cynical dismissal. He’s not arguing that politics is pure; he’s arguing that it’s functional - and that functionality is an achievement worth protecting.

Context matters because Muskie’s era was saturated with reasons to lose faith: Vietnam, civil rights backlash, the fraying trust that would soon curdle into Watergate-era suspicion. His own 1972 campaign was famously shaped by media narratives about emotion and “anger,” making this line read like damage control and a moral stance at once. The subtext is a plea against nihilism: don’t let the ugliness of campaigning become an excuse to abandon the legitimacy of the process itself. In a moment when Americans were learning to confuse outrage with truth, Muskie is insisting that institutions can survive our worst moods - if we choose to let them.