Politics & Power Quote by Mike Johanns

The sentence is the kind of bureaucratic reassurance that tries to feel like leadership without taking the risk of specificity. Johanns frames it with "Today", a word that telegraphs urgency and progress while quietly lowering the bar: whatever was true yesterday is being replaced by a new, improved present. It is governance as calendar management. The promise isn’t that testing is sufficient or effective, but that a system exists and can be named. Existence becomes performance.

The verb choice matters. "We can tell people" centers messaging, not outcomes. The audience isn’t hospitals, labs, or frontline workers; it’s "people" as a mass public whose anxiety can be managed through official narration. The subject is trust, and the tactic is procedural credibility: "a testing process", "facilities", "in place". These are institutional nouns designed to sound solid, even if they’re elastic in meaning. "Process" suggests rigor without revealing criteria. "Facilities" implies capacity without numbers. "In place" is the rhetorical equivalent of "handled."

"On a nationwide basis" does the heaviest lifting. It converts patchwork into a panorama, implying uniform coverage across states that may, in reality, be unevenly resourced and differently governed. The line gestures at federal competence in a landscape where responsibility is often fragmented, and it provides a shield against the next question: is it working?

In context, this reads like crisis-era political communications: reassure, claim infrastructure, avoid commitments that can be audited tomorrow. It’s not a lie so much as an attempt to win the argument at the level of mood, where relief counts as a result.