Politics & Power Quote by Pat Oliphant

Boredom here is a tell, and a tactic. Oliphant, a political cartoonist by trade, isn’t confessing disengagement so much as rejecting politics’ self-mythology: the idea that it’s primarily about grand ideologies, noble institutions, or tidy policy debates. In his hands, politics is a stage set. The real story is the cast.

That framing is both pragmatic and slyly accusatory. Calling politics “boring” punctures the inflated importance politicians claim for their work. It suggests that the machinery of governance, with its procedures and talking points, becomes repetitive the moment it’s cut off from character: ego, vanity, opportunism, cowardice, charm. For a cartoonist, that’s not gossip; it’s the engine. Satire lives or dies on the premise that power is personal before it’s philosophical. You can draw a budget; you can’t caricature one. You can, however, caricature the human impulses that produce the budget.

The subtext also doubles as a defense of the cartoonist’s method. Oliphant implies that political truth is often revealed less by official outcomes than by the behavior of the people who manufacture them: how they posture, who they fear, what they’ll say to stay in the room. In that sense, “people involved” isn’t a soft human-interest turn; it’s a sharp diagnostic lens. He’s telling you where to look if you want to understand why politics so often disappoints: not in the ideals it advertises, but in the personalities it rewards.