June 25, 2025

Sometimes, when they say you’re ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

George McGovern (1922–2012), American Democratic politician, in Observer, 18 March 1990, ‘Sayings of the Week’, Jay p.240

How soon after you were first elected did you charge ahead on some issue, thinking you were ahead of your time, and then fell flat on your face? What lesson did you take away? Has that made you a more careful—and perhaps boring—politician?

True, but sometimes people are ahead of their time: the suffragists are a perfect example. If they hadn’t kicked up the fuss they did in the first two decades of the twentieth century, women might still be without the vote. The more mild-mannered women of Switzerland only voted in a federal election for the first time in 1971!