Politics & Power Quote by Sharron Angle

Calling yourself "too conservative" and then drafting Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin as your defense is less a history lesson than a brand maneuver. Sharron Angle’s line tries to flip a liability into an inheritance: if critics say she’s outside the mainstream, she reframes “mainstream” as whatever the Founders supposedly were. It’s a neat rhetorical hack because it doesn’t argue policy; it argues legitimacy. The implied message is: if you reject me, you’re rejecting the American origin story.

The subtext relies on a familiar political shortcut: collapse messy, contradictory figures into a single, usable symbol. Jefferson the small-government apostle, Washington the national unifier, Franklin the pragmatist-inventor get compressed into an endorsement team for a modern ideological label they never used. “Fairly relative” does extra work here, too. It’s an appeal to subjectivity that lets Angle dodge the concrete question of what, exactly, counts as “too” conservative in today’s terms. If the label is relative, then the criticism isn’t substantive; it’s just bias.

In context, this kind of move makes sense for a politician trying to energize a base suspicious of institutions and elites. You wrap yourself in the Founders not because it clarifies your agenda, but because it sanctifies it. The irony is that invoking Franklin’s pragmatism and Washington’s anxiety about faction as cover for ideological purity reveals the quote’s real intent: not to meet the critique, but to outflank it with mythology.