Politics & Power Quote by Clarence Darrow

The joke lands because it flips a sunny civic myth into a diagnosis. “Anybody can become President” is the kind of boosterish lesson adults feed children to turn hierarchy into hope. Darrow’s punchline - “I’m beginning to believe it” - pretends to affirm that ideal while actually draining it of dignity. He’s not celebrating democracy; he’s pointing out how easily the highest office can be captured by the merely available.

Darrow wrote and spoke in an America that was loudly modernizing and quietly unraveling: industrial fortunes hardening into political influence, machine politics thriving, reform movements colliding with corruption, and public faith in expertise wobbling. As a lawyer famous for fighting the pieties of his time, he aims at the complacency behind the national bedtime story. The subtext is that “anybody” doesn’t mean “everyone has a fair shot.” It means the selection mechanisms are so porous - or so compromised - that mediocrity, opportunism, and spectacle can slip through.

The brilliance is its courtroom economy: one sentence of setup, one sentence of reversal, no sermon. It also needles a deeper American contradiction. We want the presidency to be both ordinary (a citizen’s job) and extraordinary (a moral emblem). Darrow exploits that tension by suggesting the office is neither sacred nor safely meritocratic; it’s contingent, human, and therefore dangerously susceptible to the country’s worst impulses. The laughter he invites is the kind that keeps you from applauding too quickly.