Politics & Power Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

Kennedy is doing the politician’s two-step: affirm the public’s toughness while quietly arguing they still need to be managed. “Resilience and strength” flatters Americans in a way that preemptively disarms suspicion of paternalism. It’s a soft pat on the back that clears space for the real agenda phrase: “risk communication strategies.” That technocratic packaging matters. He’s not talking about truth-telling in a raw sense; he’s talking about message design, sequencing, and framing under stress.

The subtext is that panic and mistrust are not inevitable features of a crisis; they’re partly products of institutional performance. If authorities communicate badly, the public isn’t “weak,” it’s misled, whiplashed, or left to fill in gaps with rumor and partisan narrative. If they communicate well, they can “tap into” civic capacity. The loaded verb is “amplify.” It implies resilience isn’t just discovered, it can be engineered, even boosted like a signal. That’s both optimistic and faintly unnerving: the same tools that build collective calm can shade into manipulation, especially when officials decide what counts as “good” communication.

Contextually, this lives in the post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-COVID political reality where faith in institutions is uneven and crisis response is inseparable from media ecosystems. Kennedy (a scion of a family built on public persuasion) is making a consequential claim: competence now includes narrative competence. In a fragmented information market, “strength” becomes not just a trait of citizens, but a resource governments can either squander or activate.