Time & Perspective Quote by Jim Bolger

Bolger’s phrasing is doing two jobs at once: it’s a procedural complaint dressed as a moral judgment, and it’s a not-so-subtle attempt to delegitimize an opponent by portraying them as corrupting the public conversation. The key move is “target your answers to get the instant response.” He’s not attacking polling in the abstract; he’s attacking the feedback loop between message discipline and measurement - politicians (or their handlers) learning to speak in pre-tested bursts that trigger approval rather than convey conviction. “Instant response” sounds like a Pavlovian electorate, and Bolger positions himself as the adult in the room refusing to perform.

The subtext is anxious and strategic. By calling it “manipulative,” Bolger reframes a common modern campaign tactic - tailoring rhetoric to what people already want to hear - as a kind of soft fraud. That matters because it shifts the battlefield from policy to legitimacy: if the other side is gaming sentiment, then their popularity becomes suspect, their mandate thin, their every soundbite a con.

Then comes the snap: “I really have no time for that worm at all.” “Worm” is unusually personal for a statesmanly register, and that’s the point. It’s disgust language, meant to collapse any ambiguity about motives. Bolger isn’t merely disagreeing; he’s stripping the target of stature. In context, it reads like a critique of late-20th-century politics sliding toward focus groups and media management - the early architecture of today’s attention economy - with Bolger casting himself as resisting a politics of reflexes.