"Setting the agenda and getting one's way, however, are two very different things."

“A fair body of scholarship has come to challenge the view that elected officials reign supreme.”

“The mere fact of being behind in "the greatest country on earth" is enough to constitute a problem for some people.”

“Participants perceive swings in national mood, elections bring new administrations to power and new partisan or ideological distributions to Congress, and interest groups of various descriptions press their demands on government.”

“The phrase "an idea whose time has come" captures a fundamental reality about an irresistible movement that sweeps over the politics and our society, pushing aside everything that might stand in its path.”

“Public policy changes in very large leaps, as in the New Deal of the 1930's, the Great Society of the mid-1960's, and the Reagan revolution of 1981. These spasms of reform are interspersed with periods of rest and stasis, as if the participants are exhausted from their exertion and catching their breath. But in any event, this does not look like Darwinian, gradualistic evolution.”

“People are sometimes reluctant to take big steps. Apprehensive about being unable to calculate the political fallout, politicians shy away from grand departures.”