Politics & Power Quote by Robert Teeter

Teeter’s line lands like a cool memo from inside the campaign machine: the scarce resource isn’t money or even votes, it’s attention. By framing attention as finite and politics as a shrinking slice of it, he’s not lamenting civic decay so much as redefining the battlefield. Politics no longer competes primarily with the other party; it competes with work, entertainment, family stress, and the endless low-grade stimulation of modern media.

The subtext is strategic, almost ruthless. If citizens aren’t “tuning in” the way they supposedly did a generation earlier, persuasion can’t rely on long arguments, policy seminars, or sustained news cycles. It has to win quick, emotionally legible impressions: a character cue, a single image, a negative tag that sticks. Teeter’s wording quietly shifts responsibility away from politicians (“people just don’t have the bandwidth”) while also justifying the very tactics that make politics feel thin: sound bites, micro-targeted messaging, and the prioritizing of mobilizing your base over converting the contemplative middle.

Context matters: Teeter was a Republican pollster and strategist in the era when cable news hardened, talk radio surged, and campaigns professionalized around data. His observation anticipates the attention economy before the phrase became common. The real bite is the implied concession that democratic citizenship is now a part-time job most people can’t, or won’t, work. In that world, the winners are those who understand that persuasion isn’t a lecture; it’s a capture.