The financier George Soros tells him that "the market" is wrongly seen as a pendulum, righting itself when swung to an extreme.
After all, can't the pendulum swing right back?
"The pendulum is right now swinging too far, as it naturally does after big events like this," noted DeBoer, referring to the economic downturn.
"Are we going to swing the [industrial relations] pendulum to the right?
"It's hard to get the pendulum set just right," said one senior Defense Department official.
Under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the political pendulum had swung right, and in France president Mitterrand had been forced by the financial markets to dilute an avowedly socialist programme.
He could certainly help move the pendulum of our rights along, and we'd be better off with him at our fundraisers.
As I see it, the pendulum between individual rights and the sense of collective has swung too far toward the individual, and the expansive individualism is overshadowing the obligation to the collective.
It is, to many conservatives, about showing that Republicans still have the will, the leadership and the public support to use this moment to halt, or at least slow, an ideological pendulum swing from the right, where the nation seemed to be heading after the 2010 midterm elections, to the left, after the 2012 campaign.
As Europe's political pendulum nudges to the right, it is precisely the bastions of the center-left in Germany and Britain, once the unchallenged standard-bearers of a Clintonesque Third Way, that stand nervously in the path of the threatening right-wing advance.
