"What mattered in politics... was not attachment to principle but the struggle for office," was Lewis Namier's description of politics in the age of George III.
And while it is true that he was re-elected in part because Americans had begun to see the success of his economic policies, there is also no question that voters liked his attachment to principle in hard times.
One is, obviously, Mohammad Khan himself, a 37-year-old American-born graduate of the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture whose attachment to principle and bristling pride are both his strength and his weakness.
"The Ivorian youth is showing the whole world its attachment to democratic principles.
Too often the degree of political attachment to eternal principles is a function of the glue of partisan interest.
He makes a speech preaching the virtues of democracy and then proceeds with his trade mission, flogging arms to regimes not known for robust attachment to democratic principles.
Only he could have done it, because of his unremitting attachment to his principles and his capacity for the sheer slog involved in leading a tiny political party for 36 years.
He and his wife regularly speak of their attachment to Islamic principles and the values of the old Ottoman empire, on the ruins of which the modern Turkish state was founded in 1923.
The alternative to Montalembert's doctrine was no longer an unconditional attachment to the principles of the ancien régime but a new kind of Ultramontanism, asserting the need for concentrating church authority in the pope's hands.
Mr. Mackouzangda, the former presidential spokesman, said the rebels had carried out "a hammer-blow against democracy," though critics say that Mr. Bozizé's government was not known for its attachment to democratic principles, either.
