Executive confidence alone is power enough to move ideas into law

Evidence

Ultimately, he had learned through his experience with John Purroy Mitchel, it all came down to a question of power. An idea was no good without power behind it, power to make people adopt it, power to reward them when they did, power to crush them when they didn’t. If he still had no position and no power of his own, if his only power was the confidence of one man, still, in Al Smith’s Albany, when that one man was Al Smith, that was a not inconsiderable amount of power. “Executive support,” he had learned, was the essential that one could not do without if one did not have power of one’s own. Now he had that support. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 614

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch8’s claim that ‘power, not logic or brilliance, is what actually builds public works’ — Moses here articulates the lesson personally. — connects to: Proximity to a skilled boss transmits political craft invisibly; Free government requires that the executive act only under law made by parliamentary deliberation — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2872
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the sacrifice article’s theme of power structures: this is the pragmatic mechanics of a patronage-based political machine that a reformer must master.