Leadership Quote by John McCarthy

McCarthy’s line lands like a trapdoor under the civic pieties we’re supposed to stand on. It starts with a familiar complaint - the elected official who “forgets” campaign promises - then flips it into something darker: sometimes the real danger is a politician who remembers. The joke isn’t just cynicism for its own sake; it’s a warning about what campaign promises often are: not commitments to the public good, but commitments to a faction, an ideology, or a simplistic slogan that can’t survive contact with governing.

The subtext is that democracy doesn’t just reward sincerity, it rewards salesmanship. Candidates are incentivized to make maximal, crowd-pleasing pledges in the heat of an election, when complexity reads like weakness. Once in office, “forgetting” becomes a crude kind of correction mechanism: a tacit admission that the promise was performative, impractical, or morally dubious. McCarthy’s twist suggests that rigid follow-through can be worse than opportunistic betrayal, because it turns governance into a hostage situation: the official feels bound to a line he used to win, even if reality, evidence, or unintended consequences demand retreat.

As a politician’s remark, it also carries a self-protective edge. It reframes “flip-flopping” - normally a career-ending charge - as prudence, even responsibility. The wit works because it forces an uncomfortable question: do we actually want leaders who keep every promise, or leaders who can break the ones that shouldn’t have been made?