"I think that at this stage of the political crisis, Golden Dawn did not have any substantive wins," he replies.
I ask Thanasis what he thought of the election result and the percentages of Golden Dawn: "I think that at this stage of the political crisis, Golden Dawn did not have any substantive wins.
Latinos had high hopes for the last 10 years, but have been left with no substantive policy wins for their community and are witnessing an election cycle that began with a candidate for the Republican nomination calling Mexicans "criminals" and "rapists".
Both Democrats and Republicans had lined up behind it and were looking forward to both a substantive and political win.
Suppose there are only two candidates, A and B, in the precinct and the vote count without cheating would have been heavily in favour of A anyway, i.e. the false recording of votes made no significant difference either in terms of the substantive outcome (A winning) or in terms of the margin of the win (A winning by a landslide).
Yet that movement has so far had more success in building an alternative food chain than it has in winning substantive changes from Big Food or Washington.
Republicans said they were intent on winning substantive changes to the bill and accused the Democrats of rushing the most far-reaching overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression.
And the coming summit is shrewdly conceived to give Republicans a chance either to win some substantive points - Obama is already talking about adding tort reform to the mix - or to show their overriding motive is to defeat a Democratic president, not fix health care.
Back in 1984, shortly after arriving in this country, I remember watching the second debate between Reagan and Mondale, and thinking that, for the second time in a row, the challenger had easily won the substantive exchanges.
Arabs Palestinians had low expectations of Israel's election and always doubted it would lead to a re-launch of substantive peace negotiations, whoever won – though the Labor party's Isaac Herzog would certainly have held out more promise on paper.
