Politics & Power Quote by John George Nicolay

The line lands like a polite Midwestern compliment with a knife inside it: yes, Lincoln was a moral statesman, but he was also a consummate operator who grasped the least romantic fact about democracy - virtue doesn’t count votes. Nicolay, Lincoln’s longtime secretary and later guardian of his legend, isn’t merely admiring “practicality.” He’s rehabilitating ambition as responsibility, insisting that the hard, slightly grubby work of winning is part of governing, not a betrayal of it.

The phrasing does clever double duty. “Obvious truth” pretends this is common sense, which shames the naive without sounding cruel. “It does not suffice merely to nominate” deflates the fantasy that politics is a ceremony of good intentions. The kicker - “Something must also be done” - is deliberately vague, and that vagueness is the point. It creates a wide umbrella under which everything from coalition-building to patronage to relentless message discipline can be filed as necessary, even admirable. Nicolay is normalizing machine politics while keeping Lincoln above the stink of it.

Context matters. Nicolay wrote in an America where parties were becoming more organized, elections more mass-mediated, and Lincoln’s memory increasingly contested and merchandised. This sentence is a small act of myth-management: it casts Lincoln as both principled and effective, the kind of leader who understands that if you want emancipation, union, or any large moral project, you first have to win. The subtext is a warning to reformers and idealists: purity that can’t take power is just another form of self-indulgence.