Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Nixon

A politician who is "never at a loss for words" sounds, on paper, like a civic virtue: preparedness, command, leadership. Nixon’s twist is that the talent isn’t wisdom, it’s readiness for performance. The punchline is in "half-expecting" - not fully expecting, because politics is chaos - but always primed, like a microphone is always about to swing his way. He frames fluency as reflex, not thought.

Coming from a president whose career was shaped by television, tight scripting, and the constant management of public perception, the line reads less like admiration than a wary self-portrait. Nixon knew the modern political arena rewards the person who can fill silence faster than the person who can sit with complexity. If you’re always rehearsing the speech, you’re also always pre-loading the answer. That’s a kind of armor: words as insulation against surprise, vulnerability, and the dangerous moment when someone asks a question you can’t choreograph.

The subtext is darker: "never at a loss for words" can be a symptom of professionalized evasion. A true politician, in this view, is built to talk around a problem, to keep the narrative moving, to avoid the fatal pause where sincerity might leak in. Nixon is diagnosing a system that treats governance as an endless press conference, where the skill isn’t saying something true, but saying something that lands.