Politics & Power Quote by Elliot Richardson

There is something almost surgical about the insult here: it’s wrapped in congratulations. Richardson’s line turns the most intoxicating fact in politics - a landslide re-election - into a diagnosis. You didn’t lose, he tells the president; you’re acting like someone who can’t metabolize victory. The repetition ("won, not only won") is doing double duty: it mimics the president’s own taste for emphatic, TV-ready certainty, then pivots that rhetoric against him. Triumph, in this framing, isn’t clarifying. It’s corrupting.

The specific intent is admonition with a lawyer’s restraint. Richardson isn’t accusing the president of being unpopular or incompetent. He’s warning that power has become a psychological problem: the inability to stop campaigning, stop punishing enemies, stop reaching for control when the electorate has already handed you control. The phrase "somehow been unable to realize" is polite on the surface, brutal underneath; it implies a failure of judgment so basic it borders on delusion.

Context matters. Richardson was a patrician Republican and a rule-of-law figure who became a moral counterweight during the Nixon era, culminating in his resignation rather than carry out the "Saturday Night Massacre". Read through that lens, the line lands as an early articulation of the Watergate pathology: a presidency so paranoid and transactional it kept behaving like an embattled machine even after it had been overwhelmingly ratified. Victory didn’t end the siege mentality; it validated it.