Science & Tech Quote by Lesley Stahl

There’s a deliciously deflating honesty in Stahl’s inventory of “administration”: not power, not strategy, not ideology, just the Xerox machine and the bills. It’s the sound of someone walking into a system that sells itself as consequential and discovering the unglamorous machinery that actually keeps it alive. Coming from a journalist, the line also reads like a private correction to the public narrative she’s spent decades covering. We talk about administrations as eras and worldviews; she’s reminding you they are also toner, paperwork, and the slow grind of process.

The specificity matters. “The Xerox machine” is dated enough to evoke a particular institutional world: pre-cloud, pre-Slack, a workplace where authority is literally reproduced on paper. It’s a symbol of bureaucracy’s quiet dominance, the way decisions are less often thunderbolts than forms that get copied, routed, and filed. “Paying bills” yanks politics down to the level of household management, exposing how governance is frequently framed as stewardship rather than vision.

Subtext: Stahl is puncturing her own naive assumption while inviting you to interrogate yours. If even a seasoned observer initially conflated “administration” with office management, what does that say about how the term is marketed, especially in Washington-speak? It’s not just self-deprecation; it’s a critique of euphemism. “Administration” sounds antiseptic and grand. The reality is mundane, procedural, and, in that mundanity, revealing: power often hides inside the boring parts.