Politics & Power Quote by Anita Dunn

Name-dropping Mao and Mother Teresa in the same breath is the kind of provocation that only works if you understand Washington as a culture that rewards audacity dressed up as pragmatism. Anita Dunn isn’t offering a book-club syllabus; she’s performing a permission slip. By yoking an authoritarian revolutionary to a sainted humanitarian, she builds a rhetorical super-weapon: radical change plus moral cover. It’s a way of saying, You can be ruthless about outcomes and still narrate yourself as serving the good.

The sly subtext is that politics runs on unlikely coalitions and borrowed legitimacy. Mao signals discipline, mobilization, and the willingness to bulldoze norms in the name of a future vision. Mother Teresa signals compassion, sacrifice, and an aura of unimpeachable intent. Put together, they create a sanitized, bipartisan-adjacent myth of leadership: disrupt the system, but keep your conscience clean. The line “not often coupled” functions like a wink - she knows it’s a weird pairing, and she’s betting the audience will be more impressed by the boldness than alarmed by the implications.

Context matters: Dunn, as an operative and public servant, speaks from a world where “choices” and “challenge” aren’t motivational posters; they’re policy fights, message discipline, and institutional trench warfare. The quote’s real intent is managerial: normalize rule-bending as innovation. “How to do things that have never been done before” is aspirational on the surface, but in political practice it can mean bypassing conventions, hardening strategy, and taking heat. The genius, and the risk, is that it frames power as personal growth.