"It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons"
About this Quote
There is a deliciously Beltway way Sally Quinn makes decline sound like weather: inevitable, seasonal, almost bureaucratic. “Second administration” isn’t just a chronological marker; it’s Washington code for the moment a presidency stops pretending it’s insurgent and starts acting like an institution protecting itself. The first term sells the story. The second term guards the brand.
Quinn’s real target is the reflexive defensiveness that sets in once power feels permanent. “Things start to go sour” has the passive voice of scandal-management: nobody did anything, the milk just turned. That phrasing mirrors how insiders talk when they’re trying to keep culpability diffuse and options open. It’s less moral judgment than an observational diagnosis of a political ecosystem where fatigue, overconfidence, and accumulated enemies converge.
“Circle the wagons” is the sharpest choice here. It pulls a frontier metaphor into a world of Georgetown dinner tables, exposing the tribal instinct beneath the polished rhetoric. The phrase implies siege mentality: loyalty tests, message discipline, punishing leaks, treating criticism as betrayal. And it hints at why second terms unravel so reliably: the campaign coalition shrinks into a court. Staffers get protective, donors get restless, rival factions see opportunity, and the press stops grading on potential and starts grading on results.
Coming from a journalist associated with Washington’s social and political class, the line also carries a wink of insider realism: she’s not shocked by the circling. She’s naming it as the capital’s most predictable self-defense mechanism, and maybe its most corrosive one.
Quinn’s real target is the reflexive defensiveness that sets in once power feels permanent. “Things start to go sour” has the passive voice of scandal-management: nobody did anything, the milk just turned. That phrasing mirrors how insiders talk when they’re trying to keep culpability diffuse and options open. It’s less moral judgment than an observational diagnosis of a political ecosystem where fatigue, overconfidence, and accumulated enemies converge.
“Circle the wagons” is the sharpest choice here. It pulls a frontier metaphor into a world of Georgetown dinner tables, exposing the tribal instinct beneath the polished rhetoric. The phrase implies siege mentality: loyalty tests, message discipline, punishing leaks, treating criticism as betrayal. And it hints at why second terms unravel so reliably: the campaign coalition shrinks into a court. Staffers get protective, donors get restless, rival factions see opportunity, and the press stops grading on potential and starts grading on results.
Coming from a journalist associated with Washington’s social and political class, the line also carries a wink of insider realism: she’s not shocked by the circling. She’s naming it as the capital’s most predictable self-defense mechanism, and maybe its most corrosive one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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