Candidates often do well to avoid the voter's main concerns, because, Gaylord said in a remarkable passage that is worth italicizing,”important issues can be of limited value.” […] Gaylord allowed that positive proposals by candidates can be useful, but warned candidates to consider the implications of any proposals they offered: “Does it help, or at least not harm, efforts to raise money? […] Gaylord's suggestions are notable not because they are unusual, but because they are typical (if rather candid) examples of the advice candidates in both parties receive all the time. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” II, pp. 22-23)

If what government actually does is not taken seriously, then those engaged in government and politics are not taken seriously, either. When they are not seen as a band of criminals, they are viewed as being no more than ordinary celebrities. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” III, p.28)

Moreover, if citizens feel they no longer have some measure of control over government, they will not have a large stake in what politicians do. They become mere spectators watching with growing fury and detachment what “those politicians” are doing at the public expense. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” III, p.28)

What has been lost is all distinction between the public and the private realm. The flip side of turning public business into a matter of private foibles is the tendency of the culture to view anyone's private life as appropriate for public discussion. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” III, p.28)

But is this globalization such a leap forward, and more particularly, who is leaping forward and who is falling back? For it is the central fact of the global economy that individuals who even a generation ago felt secure in an economic competition confined within national borders are now competing with hundreds of millions of people willing to work for less, under conditions that American workers would regard as barbaric. For those caught up in the bottom rung of this competition, argue the critics of globalism, it can't be progress to see hourly wage rates decline form year to year. It can't be progress, they say, to see companies cut back benefits for full-time workers, or to see the largest explosion of employment occurring among temporary workers for whom companies need not supply health insurance, pensions or paid vacations. Can it be progress they ask, if there is a steady widening of inequalities in both income and wealth? Americans have never minded the rich getting richer, as long as everyone else gets richer, too. The new economy, however, seems to break the link between the the success of the affluent and the well-being of everyone else. And in the new circumstances, legislated social gains for struggled over generations – laws on the environment, workplace safety, child labor – are steadily eroded by international competitive pressures. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” pp. 37-38)

Taken as a whole, the world is indeed far richer than it was a decade or a half century ago. Global integration combine with technological progress holds the potential Sachs described, of a historic expansion of wealth and opportunity. […] But it is just as undeniable that the process of global integration creates large new problems, which make it harder and harder for national governments to exercise authority. This process creates a sense that things are out of control. It simultaneously fosters new economic growth and new inequalities. It creates both new classes of economic winners and new classes of losers. The bitterness of those on the edge is heightened by a sense of moral betrayal, since most of those losing out do so despite their commitments to the rules, values and aspirations the society claims to revere. (Chapter 1, “Why Politicians Don't Get Respect Anymore,” p.38)

The increasing ease with which money, equipment, and whole factories can be moved to anywhere in the world has created all manner of dislocations. Blue-collar jobs, once the keystone of what we (and under different labels, the Western Europeans) thought of as a middle-class standard of living, can be shipped off at a moment's notice. When factories are mobile, national labor, safety, and environmental regulations are increasingly difficult to enforce. If companies don't like certain regulations, they can just pick up and move. Competition in the world market forces many of them to do just that. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” II, p.39)

Fred Luntz, a Republican pollster […] has called the new cohort on the road to downward mobility “the underachievers.” They are an angry group whose income and status do not match what they had reason to expect that their levels of education would earn them. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” II, p.41)

Economists Robert H. Frank and Philip Cook point to the rise of what they call “the winner-take-all society” in which “a handful of top performers walk away with the lion's share of total rewards.” (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” II, p. 43)

[After World War II] At home, the governments of the wealthy pursued what Walter Russell Mead has called “the social democratic bargain.” This bargain was a marriage between the market economics preached by capitalists and the welfare and worker protections preached by socialists. […]

It was a good deal, and it was possible to make it because market economic delivered the goods and because national governments had the power to tax and spend and regulate pretty much as they and their electorates wanted to. […]

It should be recalled that this bargain was designed to preserve market capitalism by protecting citizens from some of its more extreme unpredictabilities […] The idea, which worked, was that people would accept the risks created by capitalism if they were provided a basic level of security.

New economic trends have made that security far more tenuous, which is what underlies the moodiness throughout the electorates of the democracies. […] Voters sense that big changes are taking place and that their own national governments have less power than ever to deal with them. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” III, pp. 46-47)

As the economic moorings of politics have decayed, so have its philosophical underpinnings. […] As Ralph Dahrend argued, democratic citizens came to see government bureaucrats as a new democratic nomenklatura, a class apart from the people with its own interests and priorities. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” III, p.48)

As the economic moorings of politics have decayed, so have its philosophical underpinnings. […] As Ralph Dahrend argued, democratic citizens came to see government bureaucrats as a new democratic nomenklatura, a class apart from the people with its own interests and priorities. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” III, p.48)

If family and sexuality are at one end of the moral crisis, the work ethic is at the other. Richard Cornuelle, a libertarian writer, once noted that one of the many tricks America played on Karl Marx was to produce “a working class with proletarian status but with middle-class means.” But for many among the unskilled – including many who decidedly did not think of themselves as “proletarians” – middle-class means are increasingly elusive. Americans who worked longer hours for stagnant or declining wages wondered whether the proclamations of the country's public creed about the value of hard work bore any relationship to the country's treatment of those who worked hard. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” IV, p.53)

All of these developments, of course, were viewed by many as positive, leading to greater efficiency in labor and financial markets and to leaner and more competitive companies. But there could be no denying that these developments reshaped and transformed moral attitudes. For those caught up in the wrong end of “downsizing” (or in a word particularly offensive to those thrown out of work “rightsizing”), the social contract seemed broken. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” IV, p.54)

The debate rarely reached the issue of whether there might be a large contradiction in our public creed – whether virtues that made for good parents, or neighbors, or citizens might not be at odds with the characteristics that made for success and celebrity. Many aspects of the economy that conservatives celebrated seemed to undermine the very virtues that conservatives claimed to revere. (Chapter 2, “Politicians Adrift,” IV, p.54)

As we shall see shortly, the Democratic loss among non-college-educated whites was hugely important. This group, the most fluid in the electorate, has suffered the sharpest economic declines and therefore is potentially the angriest portion of the electorate – it lies at the heart of the Anxious Middle. Like the Perot constituency with which it overlaps, this group is quick to punish. (Chapter 3, “The Politics of the Anxious Middle,” IV, p.85)

Since welfare reform did not come close to passage in the 103d Congress, the initiative fell to the Republicans. The Republican proposals of 1995 were breathtakingly radical when seen in the context of the 1994 debate. […] Liberals who opposed Clinton would have been overjoyed to pass his plan as an alternative to the Republican proposals of a year later. (Chapter 5, “The Failure of Reform,” III, p. 134)

What had been one of Clinton's most powerful issues, the insecurity created by the global economy, turned on him with a vengeance. Economically insecure voters who had rejected Bush now rejected Clinton, too. Writing after the 1994 elections, Jeff Faux, President of the Economic Policy Institute, noted that the Clinton Democrats might inadvertently have aggravated those insecurities and frustrations by repeating over and over that workers would have to work harder, retrain themselves, switch jobs. Many workers, Faux observed, did not like this new treadmill and resented being told that they weren't working hard enough – that they are the problem. No wonder the Republicans' claim that there was nothing wrong with America that couldn't be solved by a tax cut sounded so soothing. (Chapter 5, “The Failure of Reform,” VII, p. 147)

As long as Clinton was president, and the Republicans were in the congressional minority, government could not be allowed to work. Discrediting the government remained at the heart of the Republican strategy. Democrats were so divided that they ended up complicit in this strategy. (Chapter 6, VI, p. 177)

The press, radio, and television have no obligations to Democrats or Republicans. But they do have a powerful obligation to worry about their role in the functioning of a democratic republic. (Chapter 8 “No News is Good News,” V, p. 254)