Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dan Sullivan has taken to summarizing his campaign with a sentence about his view of Alaska's virtues: "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right about Alaska."
He doesn't drop this line into debates as regularly as he inserts the names of Harry Reid and President Barack Obama, but it has clearly emerged as a favorite, repeated by his backers on Twitter and elsewhere.
An alert reader in Juneau called my attention to another political parallelism.
On Jan. 20, 1993, William Jefferson Clinton did something similar in his 14-minute inaugural address, a model of brevity.
"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America," Clinton said, pausing for the steady applause that followed on that winter day in Washington.
It was the most quoted line in the speech, one that Obama called upon in a speech he gave about race in Philadelphia before the 2008 election. Others have expressed similar sentiments in their own ways.
In a 2010 rally for Gov. Rick Perry in Texas, Sarah Palin said: "There's nothing wrong with America that Americans can't fix."
David Kusnet, the chief speechwriter for Clinton, came up with the phrase for Clinton, borrowing from a statement that the candidate had repeated during his campaign, "Every problem in America has been solved somewhere," wrote Robert Schlesinger in his history of White House speechwriters.
Alaska Dispatch Publishing