Politics & Power Quote by Pete du Pont

Du Pont’s line lands like a sigh from inside the machine: politics doesn’t just resist change, it metabolizes it into delay. “Very slowly” isn’t merely a complaint about bureaucracy; it’s an indictment of a system designed to reward caution, punish risk, and stretch any hard decision across election cycles until urgency expires. The sentence is spare, almost managerial, which fits a veteran politician’s instinct to sound pragmatic rather than poetic. That restraint is the point: he’s not selling hope, he’s warning about the default setting.

The second sentence sharpens the critique by turning policy into repetition compulsion. “The same wars” works on two registers at once. Literally, it nods to recurring battles over budgets, taxes, regulation, and social policy - issues that reliably reheat because they’re identity-coded and donor-funded as much as they are problem-solving. Figuratively, it suggests a political culture addicted to conflict as a renewable resource. If you can’t resolve a fight, you can at least sustain a coalition by keeping it alive.

As a Republican governor and later a national figure, du Pont is also speaking to the frustration of would-be reformers inside both parties: the sensation that new ideas are filtered through legacy institutions, entrenched interests, and media incentives that prefer drama over settlement. The subtext is weary realism with a hint of self-implication: the “we” includes the people who benefit from the slowness. It’s a line that flatters no one, least of all the speaker, which is why it rings true.