More Than Possible

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

The phrase, practically a cliché in political circles, is usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck , the Prussian politician who unified Germany in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Bismarck, of course, said it in German : Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. The word he used for”possible”, “Möglichen”, can have the connotation of “maximum possible”, which is very different from the usual American interpretation of the phrase: “You have to s...