A politician wins support by refusing to claim a reform as his own program
Evidence
For “executive support,” Moses—for the first time in his life—did not have to plead. You just get the facts and come up with the recommendations, Al Smith had told the commission staffers. He would fight for them. And now, he fought, stumping the state to remind the voters that the commission’s recommendations were supported by the GOP’s most prestigious members and should be treated as nonpartisan proposals instead of as bills being pushed on a Republican Legislature by a Democratic Governor trying to curb its powers. … Al Smith on the stump was a political weapon of the highest caliber. “I believe that I enjoy some little reputation for keeping my word,” he said in one speech. “I will give it—I will give it to this Legislature—that if they will come with me, take this report, do the best that they can with it, I am not going to be the fellow who insists on getting his bill the way it is printed [without compromise, in the form it is first introduced] because usually that fellow doesn’t want the bill…. And I will promise them now that at no time in the future will it ever be referred to by me, or anybody over whom I have any control, as any program of mine. The fact of the matter is: It is not my program. The real truth about it is I could not think that all out myself.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 475
Categorization
- DEFINE: Smith’s tactic of making a bill ‘have no father’ as a way to secure passage is a discernible political strategy worth naming.
- XREF: Contrasts with Moses’s lifelong refusal to share credit or allow his projects to be treated as negotiable — Smith’s credit-surrendering here sets up the exact opposite modus operandi in Moses. — connects to: A politician’s refusal to compromise earns admiration regardless of the ideas held — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1644
Broader Connections
- A politician’s refusal to compromise earns admiration regardless of the ideas held
#qualifies(0.80) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1644