Politics & Power Quote by Frank Luntz

Luntz is doing what he does best: treating public opinion as raw material and turning it into a usable premise. The line isn’t a confession of belief so much as a tactical acknowledgement of a baseline mood. “We as Americans assume” is a soft, manipulative shorthand: it launders a political problem (low trust in corporate power) into a cultural reflex, as if skepticism is just a national quirk rather than a rational response to decades of price spikes, lobbying, and regulatory capture.

The phrase “big companies are bad” compresses an entire history of anti-monopoly instinct, post-2008 cynicism, and populist resentment into a childlike moral binary. That simplification is the point. If distrust is merely an “assumption,” it can be reframed, managed, or overwritten with better messaging. Luntz isn’t validating the suspicion; he’s naming the obstacle in order to route around it.

Then he sharpens the target: “big power companies are even worse.” “Power” lands twice, meaning electricity and political influence, and he’s banking on the audience hearing both. Utilities sit at the intersection of necessity and helplessness: you can’t boycott your grid, you can’t shop your way out of a monopoly, and when something fails, it fails loudly and dangerously. That makes them uniquely flammable in the public imagination.

Contextually, this is the language of someone preparing a rebrand: reposition the industry as reliable, innovative, even patriotic, while treating distrust as a perception problem rather than an accountability problem. The subtext is clear: don’t argue the facts first; neutralize the feeling.