There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.
The first term of the Clinton administration was very jolly. Everybody was running around meeting people and of course, in the second term, everyone went down the black hole, which also happened at the end of the Reagan administration.
Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments.
It is true what is said in Washington - 'No matter how cynical you get, it's never enough to catch up.'
On domestic policy, one of the major stories in American politics has been the growing ideological and political self-confidence of the Democratic Party, and the growing ideological and political pessimism of the Republican Party.
And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.
It's not such a bad thing to bring some naive optimism to Washington.
Though there are many differences between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, they are strikingly similar in their poor economic records and even more so in their shared pessimism and bearishness on America.
It's fashionable in some circles to be pessimistic about America, about conservative solutions, about the Republican Party. I utterly reject that pessimism.
The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
All my life, I've been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I'd get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it's not happening.
I sometimes think, as bad as things seem for progressives in this world in the Trump era, it's worse than we think it is.
