Politics & Power Quote by Richard V. Allen

Power doesn’t glide into office on ideals; it arrives on org charts. Richard V. Allen’s line is a neat piece of transition-era realism, the kind of sentence that sounds procedural while quietly asserting a political truth: the “incoming President” is less a person than a moving target, and the only people who can reliably translate that target into government are the intimates who already speak his private language.

The intent is managerial, almost soothing. Allen is justifying why a transition should be run by the President-elect’s inner circle: familiarity with “policies and practices” reduces misfires, speeds hiring, and creates coherence across agencies that otherwise run on autopilot. But the subtext is about gatekeeping. “Interpret his wishes” is doing heavy lifting. It frames staffing not as a neutral merit exercise but as an act of translation controlled by loyal intermediaries. Whoever counts as “closest” becomes the filter through which competence, ideology, and personal allegiance get converted into appointments.

Context matters because presidential transitions are a rare window when the permanent bureaucracy is vulnerable and the new team is improvising at speed. In that vacuum, proximity becomes authority. Allen’s phrasing gently normalizes a phenomenon that can look, from the outside, like nepotism or factional capture. It’s also a warning: the architecture of an administration is shaped before the first executive order, by the people empowered to define what the President “wants” when he isn’t in the room. The sentence reads like civics; it functions like a map of power.