Politics & Power Quote by David Brooks

The joke lands because it upgrades a tired metaphor into a small act of consumer rage. Politics-as-marketing has been around forever, and so has the hand-wringing about it. Brooks doesn’t argue with the comparison; he tightens it. Soap is the punchline precisely because it’s mundane, verifiable, and honest in a way campaigns rarely are: you pay, you receive a thing, it performs. Presidents, by contrast, are sold as vibes.

The subtext is a critique of the hollowing out of political promises into moral branding. “Cleanliness” is doing double duty: it nods to literal cleanliness (an ad-man’s symbol for purity) and to ethical cleanliness (integrity, transparency, decency). When candidates “really value” it, they’re not committing to any measurable reform; they’re staking out a posture. Brooks is mocking a campaign culture where the product is reassurance, not outcomes. Two competing brands, same ad copy.

Context matters: Brooks is speaking from within a media environment that prizes optics and narrative discipline, where authenticity gets staged and policies get compressed into slogans. The line “at least you get the soap” is a neat indictment of the accountability gap: consumer transactions have clearer terms than democratic ones. You can return soap; you can’t return years.

Calling Brooks a “politician” slightly miscasts the move. This is a pundit’s scalpel, not a candidate’s promise - humor used to puncture the bipartisan sameness of virtue-signaling, and to remind readers that “values” talk often substitutes for the harder work of governing.