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Eugine Nier's avatar

> The successful wonk or the bureaucrat knows that such-and-such regulation was downstream her strivings, or that such-and-such deployment only happened because of her timely intervention. She made the difference. That too is influence.

Interesting, one reason why the DC establishment hated Trump is his tendency to bypass them and crown-source that kind of work to the internet.

As someone who was following several of those blogs at the time, it was interesting watching the pipeline from an idea on one of those blogs to a phrase in a speech for a policy proposal. In some cases I could even follow the chain of influence from one online personality to another.

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cleisthenes's avatar

Ask anyone in DC why they are there and the automatic answer is invariably "I want to make a difference.". One wonders how much better the world might be if the answer was "to fulfill my assigned responsibilities competently, efficiently, and efficaciously."

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