Politics & Power Quote by John Podesta

"There are people who kind of gravitate towards running politics based on new ideas and issues, and that was what the secret was for Clinton"

John Podesta, Lawyer

About this Quote

Politics, in Podesta's telling, is less a clash of principles than a talent for trend-spotting. The line reads like insider candor: some operatives "gravitate" toward governing by surfacing "new ideas and issues", and that instinct, he suggests, was Clinton's "secret". Not vision, not ideology, not even charisma: agility. It's a remarkably technocratic definition of political genius, and it gives away how a certain Washington class wants power to look - managerial, adaptive, faintly inevitable.

The phrasing does double work. "Running politics" sounds like you can operate democracy the way you run a campaign shop or a law office: identify emerging anxieties, package a response, move the coalition. "New ideas and issues" carries a flattering implication - innovation - while quietly dodging the question of whose interests those ideas serve. The subtext is triangulation without naming it: the Clinton-era knack for absorbing threats from left and right, reframing them, and making yesterday's controversy into tomorrow's consensus.

Calling it a "secret" is also a tell. It frames strategy as a kind of craft knowledge, something understood by professionals and opaque to voters. Coming from Podesta - a lawyer and longtime Democratic power broker - the quote situates Clintonism as a method, not a moral story: politics as constant scanning for what's next, then governing in a way that feels responsive enough to win, and disciplined enough to control the agenda.

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Topic	Vision & Strategy
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About the Author

John Podesta (born January 15, 1949) is a Lawyer from USA.

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