Leadership Quote by Andrew Card

A politician warning you not to trust printed quotes is less a plea for media literacy than a confession about how power survives. Andrew Card, a consummate Washington operator, isn’t offering a grand epistemological lesson; he’s pointing to a seam in the political-media pipeline where advantage is made. The line works because it’s framed as common sense, almost folksy, while quietly shifting the burden of truth away from the speaker and onto the audience’s skepticism. If the record is unreliable, then accountability becomes negotiable.

The intent is defensive but strategic: inoculate against damaging coverage by casting doubt on the mechanism that delivers it. Card’s phrasing is careful: “shouldn’t presume” doesn’t deny that quotes are accurate, it denies you the right to assume they are. That’s an elegant maneuver. It keeps him sounding reasonable while planting a seed that any inconvenient sentence attributed to him might be a fabrication, a misunderstanding, or a malicious edit.

The subtext speaks to a long-running tension in American politics: message discipline versus a press that treats candid remarks as newsworthy evidence of character and policy. Card’s era, especially in the post-9/11 White House communications culture he helped shape, prized control of narrative. In that context, the line reads like a reminder that politics is theater with stenographers in the aisle, and that the backstage crew will always argue about what you “really” heard.

It also prefigures our current information climate. The move isn’t “the media lies” outright; it’s the softer, more corrosive version: maybe nothing is reliable, so trust the people asking for your loyalty.