Politics & Power Quote by Peter Jennings

“A couple of weeks is a long time in American politics” lands because it weaponizes understatement. Jennings, the consummate broadcast journalist, isn’t marveling at politics so much as warning viewers about its churn: the narrative you’re clinging to is already expiring. Two weeks is nothing in lived experience, but in the media-politics feedback loop it’s an era. The line flatters the audience’s sense of being in a consequential moment while quietly reminding them how quickly that feeling will be repackaged.

The intent is partly procedural. Jennings is translating a chaotic system into a digestible rule of thumb for a mass audience: don’t overcommit to today’s certainty, because the incentives of campaigns, parties, and press will manufacture a new certainty by next Tuesday. It’s also a subtle defense of journalism’s constant reset button. When the story changes fast, the coverage changes fast; what looks like fickleness can be framed as responsiveness.

Subtext: American politics is less a contest of fixed ideas than an arena of momentum, optics, and managed attention. “A couple of weeks” evokes the campaign calendar - polling cycles, opposition-research drops, news dumps, debate prep, gaffes - the short half-life of scandal and the even shorter half-life of outrage. Jennings came of age in the era when television could crown a “front-runner” and undo them just as efficiently, and he helped narrate that acceleration.

The line still reads like a primer on our present: not that politics has become shallow, but that it’s become timed. Power belongs to whoever can survive the next two weeks, then define them.