The President Is Missing

by Bill Clinton

The media knows what sells—conflict and division. It’s also quick and easy. All too often anger works better than answers; resentment better than reason; emotion trumps evidence.

Scholars call this false equivalency. It means that when you find a mountain to expose in one person or party, you have to pick a molehill on the other side and make it into a mountain to avoid being accused of bias.

You boys aren’t rich enough to afford not to pay attention.

If there is nothing else to learn from history, it’s that from humans to animals, from the most primitive to the most civilized, most individuals want to be led. Take out the leader, and the rest of the pack panics.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, a citizen asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government our founders had given us. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That’s a job no president can do alone. It’s up to all of us to keep it. And to make the most of it.