The Politics of Negotiation

In politics, quite often, so the speech writers want something. They want vivid language and they want consistency of policy. If you're jim baker and you're trying to get deals done on the hill, sometimes you don't even want an argument made because you think you can stitch together a coalition. And so you'd really rather not. You don't want languad. Never, not once, did the state department strengthen any language. Not once did it take something that was colorful and make it still more vivid. Always the bureaucratic mind, always, without exception, was to water down, to take, to turn wine into water. Now i'm old and still ignorant, but then