Politics & Power Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Merchandising politics as if it were cornflakes is a savage image because it doesn’t just criticize campaigning; it insults what campaigning has become. Stevenson’s line turns modern electioneering into a supermarket aisle, where persuasion is swapped out for packaging and “brand loyalty.” The breakfast cereal metaphor lands because it’s domestically banal: democracy isn’t being threatened by tanks in the street, but by the soft, everyday logic of consumer culture sliding into civic life.

Stevenson is aiming at a very specific postwar shift: television, advertising professionals, polling, and the rise of the candidate as product. In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign famously embraced Madison Avenue techniques and TV spots; Stevenson, the eloquent egghead, often looked like the last man insisting politics should still be a contest of arguments rather than images. The “box tops” jab is key subtext. It evokes a childish, transactional ritual: cut, collect, redeem. Votes become coupons, not judgments. Citizens are recast as customers doing a minor chore, rewarded by the feeling of belonging to a winning brand.

Calling it the “ultimate indignity” is moral language, not technical critique. Stevenson isn’t merely worried about efficiency or taste; he’s warning that treating elections as marketing degrades both sides of the democratic relationship. Candidates stop speaking like leaders with obligations, and voters stop acting like co-owners of the system. The indignity is mutual: democracy reduced to consumption, and the public reduced to a target market.