All the Truth Is Out Quotes

“(“If you think education is expensive, wait until you find out how much ignorance costs,” Hart was fond of saying.)”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“And, just as consequential, the post-Hart climate made it much easier for candidates who weren’t especially thoughtful—who didn’t have any complex understanding of governance, or even much affinity for it—to gain national prominence. When a politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media, when the status quo was to never say anything that required more than ten words’ worth of explanation, then pretty much anyone could rail against the system and glide through the process without having to establish more than a passing familiarity with the issues. As long as you weren’t delinquent on your taxes or having an affair with a stripper or engaged in some other form of rank duplicity, you could run as a “Tea Partier” or a “populist” without ever having to elaborate on what you actually believed or what you would do for the country.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“It wasn’t really up to the writer to decide what questions were relevant. The conversation “out there” had already done that, and all the poor writer could do was to shake his head sadly and try to bring some clarity to it. Surely politics would be better if we could all just refocus the debate on the things that really mattered, but it never seemed to be the journalist’s job to do the refocusing.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“However much he might deny it, then and later, it was clear that Hart had wanted to put some distance between the poor, jug-eared, Bible-toting youth he had been in Kansas and the secular, Yale-educated reformer he later became. But that didn’t make him different from a lot of other Americans who grew up in claustrophobic small towns with overbearing parents and later found themselves caught up in the cultural upheaval of the sixties, where personal identities were always evolving. It didn’t make Hart some shadowy, Gatsby-like figure; the salient facts of his upbringing had been well established since he entered public life.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“It wasn’t really up to the writer to decide what questions were relevant. The conversation “out there” had already done that, and all the poor writer could do was to shake his head sadly and try to bring some clarity to it. Surely politics would be better if we could all just refocus the debate on the things that really mattered, but it never seemed to be the journalist’s job to do the refocusing. The given issues were the given issues, in the same way that rivers just flow the way they flow, and all the helpless reporter could do was selflessly hurl himself into the murky current and try to help his readers navigate their way through.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“vein over the next month. He intended to hunker down and write. This, Dixon knew, was entirely in character for Hart—trusting in the inevitability of his superior ideas and leaving the tactics to others—and didn’t indicate any special level of avoidance; at this point no one really feared that the campaign itself was in mortal jeopardy.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“There was a time when politicians and the journalists who covered them, however adversarial their relationship might become at times, shared a basic sense of common purpose. The candidate’s job was to win an argument about the direction of the country, and the media’s job was to explain that argument and the tactics with which it was disseminated. Neither could succeed without the basic, if sometimes grudging, cooperation of the other, and often, as in the case of Hart and some of his older colleagues in the media, there existed a genuine trust and camaraderie. Modern media critics might deride these kinds of relationships as coziness or corruption, but there was a very real benefit to it for the voters, which was context. Reporters who really knew a politician could tell the difference between, say, a candidate who had misspoken from exhaustion and one who didn’t know his facts. They could be expected to discern between a rank hypocrite, on one hand, and a candidate who had actually thought something through and adjusted his views, on the other.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“Years later, most Americans who lived through the scandal would recall, erroneously, that the iconic photo had ended Hart’s candidacy. The truth was that it didn’t appear until weeks after the fact and had nothing to do with Hart’s aborted campaign. At that moment of shared experience, just before the technological Big Bang that would shatter America’s media into thousands of fragments and audiences, a single photograph still had that kind of power—to become so deeply embedded in the culture that it actually transformed our memory of the event.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“Years later, most Americans who lived through the scandal would recall, erroneously, that the iconic photo had ended Hart’s candidacy. The truth was that it didn’t appear until weeks after the fact and had nothing to do with Hart’s aborted campaign.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“the boomers who had first been drawn to journalism watching Redford and Hoffman in All the President’s Men, thirty-something men and women who had recently graduated from the police beat or City Hall to the pinnacle of political coverage. And Hart could find no sure footing with this crowd, no easy rapport or rakish bonhomie. As Richard Ben Cramer noted in What It Takes, the younger cohort continually referred to Hart in print as “cool and aloof” and a “loner,” much as you might describe a serial killer after he is discovered to have plotted his murderous spree in some isolated shed decorated with creepy cutouts of his victims. But the word they used more than any other to summarize him, particularly among themselves, was “weird.” It had started in 1984, when Hart suddenly went from marginal candidate to national sensation, and the younger reporters and editors—the ones who hadn’t been around in the early”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“Americans became desensitized to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex or drug use or cheating on a college exam. You could disappoint us, certainly, but we were now a very hard country to shock.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

“With rare exceptions, our cautious candidates were like smiling holograms programmed to speak and smile but not to interact, so that it sometimes seemed you could run your hand right through them.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid