War & Peace Quote by Thomas E. Mann

Nothing dates political power faster than the issues voters wake up worrying about. Thomas E. Mann’s sentence isn’t trying to sound poetic; it’s trying to sound inevitable. The structure is the point: “First” signals an analyst building a case, not a pundit throwing a punch. Then comes the language of slow motion disaster - “trending down,” “many months,” “accelerated in recent weeks” - a steady, measurable erosion that suggests the outcome is already baked in.

The subtext is a quiet demolition of the post-9/11 approval halo. Mann frames “the war on terrorism” less as a permanent mandate than as a temporary lens that once organized public attention. That lens has now been “supplanted,” a telling verb that implies replacement rather than resolution. National security isn’t rebutted; it’s crowded out by proximate anxieties: corporate scandals, stock market declines, economic insecurity. The list reads like a drumbeat of everyday vulnerability, shifting the emotional center of politics from fear of external enemies to suspicion of elites and dread about personal stability.

Context matters here: early-2000s America, when Enron-era corruption and market volatility made “the economy” feel like a rigged system, not an abstract indicator. Mann’s intent is diagnostic, but the diagnosis carries an argument about democracy’s attention economy. Presidents rise and fall not only on performance, but on which story is currently believable - and whether the public’s dominant story is “protect us” or “we can’t trust you.”