Politics & Power Quote by Fred Barnes

Barnes is puncturing the campaign trail’s most profitable illusion: that saying a thing loudly is the same as doing it. The line works because it yokes two worlds that voters are asked to treat as identical - the frictionless universe of promises and the stubborn universe of budgets, coalitions, and trade-offs. “Political make-believe” isn’t just a jab; it’s a diagnosis of an incentive structure. Candidates are rewarded for maximal aspiration and minimal admission of constraint. Governing, by contrast, is constraint.

The subtext is a warning about how democracy’s attention economy distorts policy. In campaigns, the cost of honesty is immediate (you sound “negative” or “small”), while the cost of fantasy is deferred (someone else has to pass the bill, negotiate the cuts, take the blame). Barnes also sneaks in a critique of rhetorical inflation: “reconciling conflicting interests” and “paying for costly programs” are the two places where slogans go to die. He’s reminding readers that every shiny proposal is a bundle of losers as well as winners, and every new benefit implies either new revenue, new debt, or cuts elsewhere.

Context matters: Barnes, a long-time conservative journalist, is writing from a worldview skeptical of expansive government promises and attuned to the gap between populist messaging and legislative reality. But the observation lands beyond ideology. It explains why campaigns feel like product launches and why governing feels like customer support: the first sells a future, the second deals with the invoice.