Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Rich

Frank Rich is pointing at a quiet regime change: politics stops being something you learn from a press conference and becomes something you absorb through entertainment, vibe, and familiarity. The line’s casual phrasing - “in that sense,” “or whomever” - is doing work. It shrugs at the individual candidates because the real subject isn’t Bush versus Gore; it’s the media ecosystem that makes their appearance on David Letterman inherently newsworthy.

The intent is both descriptive and accusatory. Rich isn’t merely noting that candidates go on late-night TV; he’s arguing that the venue itself confers political significance. A Letterman couch becomes a parallel podium, where authenticity is judged through banter, timing, and self-deprecation rather than policy fluency. That’s the subtext: the electorate is being trained to evaluate leaders the way it evaluates celebrities, and journalists can’t pretend those signals are irrelevant just because they don’t fit the old taxonomy of “hard news.”

Contextually, this tracks with late-1990s/early-2000s politics, when “soft news” surged and campaigns learned to bypass skeptical gatekeepers by cultivating likability in mass-culture spaces. Rich, a media-savvy critic, is also challenging his own industry. If millions see a candidate humanized (or exposed) in a comedic setting, the press doesn’t get to dismiss it as fluff; it has measurable political consequence. The sting is that “news” no longer belongs exclusively to journalists. It belongs to attention.