Politics & Power Quote by John O'Toole

O'Toole’s line reads less like praise for advertising than a cold description of what the U.S. has built: an economy that needs constant narration to keep moving. By framing ads as the only viable communications infrastructure, he quietly shifts advertising from a persuasive add-on to a public utility. That’s the move. If ads are “the only way,” then the system’s dependence stops being a choice and starts being a fact of nature, beyond politics, beyond reform.

The repetition of “enough” does double duty. On the surface it’s managerial, almost technocratic: scale, speed, coverage. Underneath, it’s an admission that modern capitalism isn’t about a handful of essentials; it’s about an overwhelming surplus of near-substitutes that must be sorted, branded, and made emotionally legible. Advertising becomes the social operating system that tells people what’s worth noticing, and why, in a marketplace designed to exceed human attention.

As a politician, O’Toole is also telegraphing a worldview: market stability depends on information flows, and those flows are best handled by private persuasion rather than public provision. It’s a subtle defense against regulation or moral critique. Don’t blame ads for manipulating desire; blame the complexity of abundance that makes manipulation necessary.

Read in today’s terms, the quote foreshadows an economy where “advertising” expands beyond commercials into search, feeds, influencer culture, and surveillance-driven targeting. The speed he celebrates is also the speed at which attention is harvested, and consent gets engineered.