Wit & Attitude Quote by George Voinovich

A politician saying he "doesn't give a damn about the stock market" is a deliberate act of triangulation: it yanks the conversation away from Bloomberg screens and toward paychecks. Voinovich isn’t confessing financial illiteracy; he’s signaling a hierarchy of values. The mild profanity is doing real work here. "Give a damn" performs impatience with elite scorekeeping, a rhetorical shove at the idea that the Dow is the nation’s emotional weather vane.

The subtext is a critique of a familiar distortion in American politics and media: markets get treated like a live referendum on leadership, while employment is discussed as a lagging indicator, something to be addressed once confidence is restored. Voinovich flips that script. Jobs aren’t just an economic metric; they’re a moral claim on government attention. In that framing, the stock market becomes a proxy for people who already have assets, while "jobs" stands in for households living week to week, for dignity, for stability, for a sense that the system is supposed to produce something more tangible than portfolio gains.

Context matters because Voinovich came out of an industrial Midwestern political tradition where the pain of layoffs is visible and communal. His Ohio pragmatism reads as a rebuke to the recession-era habit of declaring victory when stocks rebound, even if wages stagnate and labor participation shrinks. The line works because it refuses the shiny abstraction and chooses the messier, harder promise: prosperity measured by work people can actually get.