Politics & Power Quote by Sydney Pollack

Pollack is doing what good directors do: reminding you that the camera changes the script. His point isn’t that Washington, Lincoln, or FDR lacked greatness; it’s that the medium that crowns “leadership” has mutated. In a TV-and-now-everywhere culture, charisma isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s basic eligibility. The line “a man who might not have enormous charisma” sounds almost modest, but it’s a blade: merit and governance get treated like secondary traits when politics is cast like entertainment.

The quote works because it’s half-provocation, half confession. Pollack smuggles in a bleak idea without preaching: the electorate has become an audience trained to read competence through performance. Even the reverent roll call of American icons becomes a stress test. If the founders and emancipators might fail today’s auditions, what does that say about our criteria? Not that we’ve advanced, but that we’ve narrowed.

There’s also a craft-based subtext. Pollack’s career sits in the era when politics learned Hollywood’s grammar: the close-up, the sound bite, the “presence” that reads instantly. He’s not romanticizing the past (40 years ago is hardly a golden age); he’s marking the acceleration. The unease comes from the implied trade: we may be selecting for legibility over judgment, for telegenic certainty over the slower, less cinematic virtues that actually run a country.