5 Quotes by Matt Bai

Americans became desensitized to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex or drug use or cheating on a college exam. You could disappoint us, certainly, but we were now a very hard country to shock.

With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them.

I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.

It wasn’t really up to the writer to decide what questions were relevant. The conversation “out there” had already done that, and all the poor writer could do was to shake his head sadly and try to bring some clarity to it. Surely politics would be better if we could all just refocus the debate on the things that really mattered, but it never seemed to be the journalist’s job to do the refocusing.

Years later, most Americans who lived through the scandal would recall, erroneously, that the iconic photo had ended Hart’s candidacy. The truth was that it didn’t appear until weeks after the fact and had nothing to do with Hart’s aborted campaign.