Politics & Power Quote by William L. Jenkins

The line reads like a quiet rebuke to the political class: you can out-memo, out-credential, even out-argue your opponent, but if you misread their relationship to the public, you are fighting the wrong war. Jenkins frames Reagan as someone rivals "dismissed or underestimated", a familiar establishment error that doubles as a warning to anyone tempted to confuse insider consensus with voter reality. The insult is subtle: opponents aren’t merely wrong about Reagan; they’re incompetent at recognizing what power actually looks like in a mass democracy.

Calling that power a "weapon" is doing heavy lifting. It smuggles in the idea that politics is combat, and that the decisive advantage isn’t policy detail but emotional leverage. "Bond with the people" isn’t the soft-focus language of civic unity; it’s a strategic asset that can overwhelm conventional forms of critique. The phrase also implies scarcity: most politicians can assemble coalitions, deliver speeches, run ads. Few achieve a bond - the kind that lets supporters forgive contradictions, reinterpret failures, and treat attacks as proof of persecution.

Context matters. Reagan’s presidency sat at the intersection of post-Vietnam distrust, economic anxiety, and a media environment increasingly shaped by image and performance. His "Great Communicator" reputation wasn’t just charm; it was narrative control, the ability to translate ideology into reassurance. Jenkins, as a politician, isn’t just praising Reagan. He’s sketching a doctrine: legitimacy flows from affective connection, and elites ignore it at their peril - especially when they mistake charisma for shallowness and discover, too late, that charisma is governance’s shadow cabinet.