Politics & Power Quote by Paul Weyrich

The line lands like a rare moment of candor from a political operator who understood, better than most, how eagerly voters want a single villain or savior. Weyrich’s point isn’t that presidents are powerless; it’s that the public story we tell about economic control is theatrically overstated. By opening with “Now the truth is,” he adopts the posture of the insider lifting the curtain, a rhetorical move that signals impatience with campaign mythology and cable-news simplicity.

The sentence is carefully hedged. “Really can’t control” denies the fantasy of a presidential dial labeled GDP, inflation, jobs. The follow-up clause, “although his policies do have some effect,” keeps him from sounding naïve about governance. That balance is the subtext: economic outcomes are shaped by sprawling systems (markets, global shocks, central banks, business cycles), but politicians still benefit from pretending those systems are fully steerable. Weyrich, a conservative critic and strategist, is implicitly indicting both parties’ habit of taking credit in booms and outsourcing blame in busts.

Context matters: late-20th-century American politics increasingly sold the presidency as a CEO role, as if the White House were a corporate headquarters. Weyrich pushes back against that managerial fantasy while preserving the moral of political responsibility. The intent is pragmatic and slightly deflationary: temper expectations, complicate blame, and expose how economic rhetoric functions as a tool of persuasion. It works because it refuses the comforting binary of omnipotence versus irrelevance, leaving us with the messier truth that democracy runs on accountability even when causality is diffuse.