The question, he said, also distilled "a sentiment that was there among voters but had not come together in a coherent way".
Sarah Kendzior, a journalist with a specialty in authoritarian regimes, distilled the sentiments of many when she tweeted that the campaign was both ineffectual ("Violent conspiracy theorists won't be swayed") and unjust ("That money will be used by actual people to hurt other actual people").
But what did seem certain was that California was again poised to capture the mood of the country, just as it did in 1978 with Proposition 13, which distilled widespread antitax sentiment into a cap on property taxes.
Last month, the right-wing politician Jean-François Jean-François Copéi-Muslim sentiment into a single anecdistilledere are neighborhoods in France where children can't eat their pain au chocolat becausentimentamadan".
Robert Smith, the Cure's leader, has a pop songwriter's gift for distilling lovelorn sentiments into simple language and a voice that sounds as if it's just emerging from a crying jag.
"God Bless America," along with such mid-20's ballads as "Always," "All Alone," "What'll I Do?" and "Remember," embodies Berlin's gift for distilling common sentiments with a rock-hard simplicity.
And he distilled the same sentiments into paintings, drawings and prints, which often trembled with his love of the American landscape, of military pageantry and of blond, muscular young men.
They decided that punk distilled down to the sentiment of "I hate you", and wrote a song centered on the theme.
This sentiment was later distilled by US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who noted that "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants".
Distilled in this line, the sentiment is clear.
