He was not averse to appointing a strong deputy, Lelyveld, and entrusting him with power.
Certainly, France's republican governments have been far more inclined to entrust Jews with power than any other modern state.
Obama and the congressional leadership forgot that they won their majorities by persuading people who had voted for President George W. Bush just four years prior to entrust them with power.
When you entrust someone with power, they would say, you want a person who is calm and even-tempered, a person who thinks long and hard before making a decision, a person who speaks with careful deliberation, a person who understands the complex mesh of social relations, a person more like Barack Obama than Bibi Netanyahu.
Unless business is perceived as being entrusted with power, it is excluded.
Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power".
But one of Barrett's more admirable talents was the ability to expose misconduct by the people we entrust with power.
And no matter how entrenched our governmental institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.
They want to show that when put into action, democracy simply does not work because the parties and parliaments elected by popular will are too incompetent and incapable to be entrusted with power.
It is that if they had had power they would not have made the same strategic, prudential, and moral errors that Bush and the Republicans have made, and that if they are entrusted with power they will not be wedded to a manifestly failing policy.
He's simply asking liberals to muster some energy for the ideological fight against jihadism, in the belief that they are more likely to succeed than the Republican Party of George W. Bush, and in the related belief that they will never be entrusted with power until they do.
