[why get involved with something as bad as politics was a question that] signalled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that ... had been nourished by a generation of broken promises.

[T]here was — and always had been — another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can something meaningful done.