Political Quotes

“President Johnson 50 years ago, as Senator Harkin was talking about, declared a war on poverty down the hall in the House of Representatives in his State of the Union Message. A little later he visited Athens, OH, in the heart of Appalachia, and he said: I came out here today to see you because we can't always see poverty from the Capital in Washington. But you can see it when you get out and ride the rivers and the range, the mountains and the hills. When President Lincoln was in office, even though his staff said stay in the office, win the war, free the slaves, preserve the Union, President Lincoln would say, no, I need to get out and take my ``public opinion baths''-- I need to see the people and talk to them and understand their problems. Pope Francis recently exhorted his parish priests to go smell like the flock, obviously using the allegory of the sheep in the Old Testament and New Testament, but also saying to his parish priests: Understand how people live, talk to them about their issues and their problems and their lives and live among them as much as you can, something perhaps none of us in this body--I know the Presiding Officer from Vermont possibly does more townhalls and meetings with people than anybody in the Senate. All of us need to do that more to understand better.…”