Politics & Power Quote by Michael Chertoff

Chertoff’s sentence is bureaucratic alarm bells dressed up as calm civics. He isn’t merely pleading for decorum; he’s trying to fence off a terrain where decisions look technical and therefore legitimate. The key move is his pairing of “political” and “personal” as twin contaminants. Politics is framed as noise, personality as poison, and “good public policy” becomes the clean, neutral alternative. That contrast is doing heavy lifting: it suggests that the only responsible way to govern money is to treat it like plumbing - managed by experts, not argued over by factions.

The phrase “make the process political” is especially telling. Democratic processes are, by definition, political; what he’s really warning against is overt contestation that could expose winners, losers, and motives. When he says “make it personal,” the subtext is accountability: naming names, tracing conflicts of interest, questioning competence. Personalizing a process is often how the public learns who benefited, who failed, and who should be removed. Calling that “frustrat[ing]” policy implies that transparency itself can be a threat to administrative smoothness.

Context matters: Chertoff is a post-9/11 governance figure, associated with Homeland Security’s sprawling budgets and emergency logic. In that environment, “managing this money” often means rapid allocation under high-stakes pressure, where scrutiny slows the machine. The rhetorical strategy is to make speed and technocracy sound like responsibility, while making political debate sound like sabotage. It’s a savvy defense of institutional discretion - and a reminder of how often “good policy” is invoked to keep democratic messiness at arm’s length.