John Avlon Quotes
There once was a time when people chose their congressmen. Now congressmen choose their people.
John Avlon, Political Columnist, Speechwriter for the Mayor of New York (Republican), C-SPAN, Book TV, April 18, 2004
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The legislators control redistricting and with the aid of modern computers, choose the demographics of the voters that they want in their districts even if they have to distort and Gerrymander the election district.
In Dolgoff’s era, his argument was that the political parties were so powerful that it was they who controlled who held public office, not the voters. And the parties were controlled by a few party leaders. However, when the system was reformed in the latter part of the 20th century, the individual incumbent member of Congress in America was so hard to dislodge due to the role of money and the advantage of incumbency, that the class of professional politicians was still very powerful. Reform had reduced the control of political parties but not politicians.
Madison was right on most things, but got this one wrong. Of course he did not anticipate the era of mass communication which makes demagoguery in large areas possible.
See {632785} for the results of Gerrymandering in the 2012 election.
John Phillips Avlon is an American journalist and political commentator. He is a Senior Political Analyst and anchor at CNN and was the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018. Avlon was previously a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun and chief speechwriter for former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
