Broder borrowed this line from Jesse Jackson, who 'uttered it every time he was on a college campus or in a high school gym or auditorium' during the 1988 presidential campaign. But Broder gave it new force by unpacking its radical premise: 'The notion that rights are something that have to be earned, not given, is itself controversial. We speak of inalienable rights, of rights deriving from the creator, or from the law of nature.' He then illustrated the principle with his own story. His opportunity at the Washington Post existed because Eugene Meyer 'had the wisdom and the guts to buy a failing newspaper in the depths of the Depression,' because Katherine Graham responded to her husband's suicide by stepping up rather than stepping back, and because Broder's own father — a Polish immigrant — worked six days a week in a walk-up dental office and went back five nights a week to wait for patients who often couldn't pay. 'Those are the sum of the reasons I have not earned the right to do less than my best.'