Politics & Power Quote by Robert Teeter

Teeter’s line reads like a quiet eulogy for civic spectacle. The double command - “Look at” - isn’t just emphasis; it’s a polling man’s habit of pointing to metrics as moral evidence. He’s telling you where to aim your attention: not at candidates, not at ideology, but at the numbers that supposedly reveal what the public actually cares about. Declining TV coverage and voter turnout aren’t framed as separate problems. They’re paired as symptoms of the same diagnosis: politics has lost its monopoly on national attention.

The subtext is more pointed: if voters aren’t watching and aren’t voting, then persuasion has migrated. Power follows the audience. Teeter implies that economics has become the real narrative engine of American life - wages, inflation, jobs reports, market jitters - the stuff that reaches people whether they want to be “political” or not. That’s a strategist’s reframing: you don’t win by preaching policy purity; you win by translating everything into economic weather.

Context matters. Teeter was a Republican pollster-operator, steeped in the era when television defined campaigns and turnout was the ultimate report card. His observation anticipates a media ecosystem where political attention fragments and “economic news” functions like a national mood ring. There’s a hint of cynicism, too: economics becomes the legitimizing language, the safe wrapper for interests and values that still are political, just less honestly labeled. When he says economics moves the country “now,” he’s not celebrating technocracy; he’s warning that politics, stripped of shared rituals and mass audiences, has to hitch itself to the only story most people still feel in their gut: their paycheck.