Politics & Power Quote by Roger Ebert

Age gets deployed here less as biography than as a credentialing weapon, the kind of conversational badge that says: I was doing this before it was trendy, before cable shoutfests, before your hot take. Ebert isn’t trying to prove he’s the smartest person in the room; he’s trying to shut down the lazy insinuation that a film critic dabbling in politics is a dilettante. The line is built like a rebuttal you can hear in real time: “Well, you know what” opens with impatience, “I’m 60 years old” sets seniority as authority, and “since I was on my daddy’s knee” turns political awareness into something intimate and inherited.

The specific choice of 1948 and Truman matters. That election isn’t a vague “back in the day” reference; it’s a touchstone for underdog politics, a moment when elites and polls got it wrong. By saying “we were praying for Truman,” Ebert frames politics as moral weather, not merely strategy: families taking sides, hoping, investing faith. He’s also signaling class and cultural alignment, a Midwestern, kitchen-table Democratic sensibility that sees politics as lived consequence rather than theory.

Subtext: stop treating political commentary as an exclusive guild. A critic’s job is to read narratives, detect manipulation, and explain how public myths get made. Ebert’s point is that he’s been training for that work his whole life, even if the syllabus started on a father’s lap instead of in a seminar room.