On the morning of the 2016 presidential election, Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton about a 71% chance of winning, and Donald Trump about 29%. Trump won, and many commentators said the forecasters had got it wrong.
Silver disagreed. “We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence,” he said in 2017. “I don’t think people have a good intuitive sense for how to translate polls to probabilities.”
Starting in 2009, Barack Obama promised: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” PolitiFact counted 37 times when he said it with no caveats. In late 2013 at least 3.5 million Americans received notices that their plans were canceled.
On November 7, 2013, Obama told NBC News: “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” In December PolitiFact named the promise its Lie of the Year for 2013.
On August 18, 1988, George H. W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination in New Orleans. “And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I’ll say no. And they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say, to them, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”” The speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote the passage.
In 1990 Bush agreed to a budget compromise that increased several existing taxes. The New York Post ran the headline “Read my Lips: I Lied.” In 1992 Pat Buchanan and Bill Clinton both used the pledge against him. Bush lost the election, and the broken promise is counted among the important reasons.
On January 16, 2007, Senator Barack Obama announced that he would form a presidential exploratory committee. “For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about…” He declared his candidacy the next month, on February 10, 2007.
Federal election law calls this stage “testing the waters.” A possible candidate may raise and spend money on “polling, traveling and making telephone calls” to decide whether to run. While the person is only testing the waters, an exploratory committee does not have to register or report to the Federal Election Commission. If the person decides not to run, “there would have been no obligation to report the monies received and spent.”
As president, Abraham Lincoln put his three rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination in his cabinet: William Seward, Salmon P. Chase and Edward Bates. Later he added Edwin Stanton, who years earlier had called him a “damned long-armed ape.” Bates wrote in his diary that Lincoln “lacks will and purpose.”
Lincoln gave his reason: “We needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet.” He said he “had no right to deprive the country of their services.” Seward came to a different verdict over time: “the President is the best of us.”
Missouri is called the Show-Me State. The Missouri Secretary of State traces the slogan to Congressman Willard Vandiver at a naval banquet in Philadelphia. “…frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
Vandiver did not invent the phrase. It was in print by 1893, when the Omaha Daily Bee printed a letter from a man who wrote, “I am from Missouri and they must show me something.” The state gives the banquet as 1899. One researcher, Barry Popik, dates it to 1900, and the slogan has never been made official.
Since the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a candidate’s television and radio ads must include “a statement by the candidate that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication.” This is why almost every American campaign ad contains the sentence “I approve this message.” The rule is known as the “Stand By Your Ad” provision.
The goal was to discourage negative ads, because the candidate would have to own them personally. It did not work. Negative ads continued to grow, and some researchers found that the candidate’s statement made certain attack ads more persuasive.
On April 19, 1993, the FBI moved against the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The compound burned, and 76 people inside died, 25 of them children. Attorney General Janet Reno had approved the operation.
That night she went on television. On Nightline she said: “This was a judgment I made.” And: “I think the responsibility lies with me.” On Larry King Live she said: “It is my decision. The buck stops with me. I am responsible for it.” Newsweek wrote that her candor gave her “instant cachet.”
On 12 March 1992 the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry on the Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland, the working through of the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship in Germany. It focused on analyzing the past and setting out the connections within the dictatorship. Its results and those of a second commission fill 32 volumes with about 30,000 printed pages.
On 10 July 2025 the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry on the coronavirus pandemic. It is to produce ein Gesamtbild der Pandemie, ihrer Ursachen, Verläufe und Folgen, an overall picture of the pandemic, its causes, its course and its consequences. Its final report is due by 30 June 2027.
The Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal foundation set up by law. The law states its purpose: to present the history of the Federal Republic and of the GDR unter Einbeziehung der Vor- und Entstehungsgeschichte, including the history before them and of how they came about.
Its museum in Bonn opened in June 1994. The permanent exhibition Unsere Geschichte. Deutschland seit 1945, Our History: Germany Since 1945, counted 14.3 million visits until it closed in September 2024. The museum calls itself gegenwartsbezogen, related to the present. Although its staff are historians, it says, its task is gegenwärtige Ereignisse einzuordnen, to place current events in context.