Trump and The Gettysburg Address

It is said that Gorbachov asked Thacher how her government managed to feed the English. She said the government didn't, prices did.
In her biography, Thacher said that Gorbachov, the leader of the largest nation on Earth, did not know anything about economics.


                             

                 Trump and The Gettysburg Address


"There is a new platform--and platform concept--coming from the Republican Party. It is a curious take on the question of quality and quality.

This is culled from an editorial in The Sun:

The work on the platform for 2020 is reportedly being led by Jared Kushner. The idea is to shrink the party platform down to an index card...so that everyone can quickly understand them and compare them to the Democrats’ nostrums.

The roadmap for a condensed party platform is the one-page political document from the 1994 campaign, “A Contract With America.” Just six weeks before the congressional midterm elections, Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia, laid out an eight-point plan of what he would do as Speaker. It would go on to change history.

By presenting a short agenda and a pledge, the document made it easy for voters to understand what Republicans would do. The Contract is often credited with being the driving force behind the Republicans’ surprise take-over of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Sometimes less is more.

In previous presidential election cycles, the party’s platform committee began its work many months before the convention. The process began in the states, not Washington. It was a grassroots effort to incorporate state and local ideas into the national platform. As the size of the federal government has grown, though, so have the size and scope of the party’s platforms....So the platform has become an insiders-game, ending up as a top-down document that reflects compromises between special interests and party activists.

... Why do it the same way? Wouldn’t it be better, more usable, to make the platform shorter? And more of a political document that voters can quickly read? It reminds me of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It followed a two-hour speech that no-one remembers. The Gettysburg Address, which could also be printed on an index card, is still recited in our schools, even by Democrats.

And no wonder. Elections are about communicating ideas. So the platform should be a product that can be boiled down into soundbites and tweets."

But quantity is not opposed to quantity. In fact, the two are unrelated. Insightfulness, focus, economy, are related to quality. But I would not be too optimistic about the quality of any American modern political position paper. Or its truthfulness. But a hint: a quality position paper will start with sincere beliefs.