Politics & Power Quote by Harry Shearer

Shearer’s punchline lands because it refuses to dignify a favorite American pastime: treating elections like a personality contest with SAT scores and church attendance. He sets up a neat partisan symmetry Democrats sell competence, Republicans sell virtue then yanks the rug out with a grocery-store absurdity. “Bananas in the cheese department” isn’t just a joke; it’s a consumer metaphor for misfiled expectations. You can want bananas all day, but you’re still in the wrong aisle.

The intent is less to “both-sides” than to expose the marketing logic beneath partisan bragging. Intelligence and morality become brand attributes, not governing outcomes. Shearer, a career satirist inside an actor’s skin (Simpsons, radio, impression work), knows how public life gets reduced to characters: the wonk, the good family man, the corrupt genius, the righteous idiot. His subtext: politics is a system designed to reward performance of values more than the practice of them.

The line also takes a swipe at the audience. If you go shopping for purity in a realm built on bargaining, compromise, and incentives, you’re not naive you’re misinformed about the product. That doesn’t mean morals are irrelevant; it means the moral drama voters crave is often satisfied through symbolism: stump-speech piety, technocratic name-dropping, tribal contempt. Shearer’s cynicism is calibrated: not “everyone’s the same,” but “stop pretending the sales pitch is the inventory.”