"We're trying to get good pictures. Don't worry very much about what I say"
About this Quote
A politician telling you to ignore his words is either a Zen koan or a moment of naked candor about how modern politics actually travels. Bob Dole’s line - “We’re trying to get good pictures. Don’t worry very much about what I say” - strips the press event down to its real product: not policy, not persuasion, but usable imagery. The first sentence frames the whole encounter as production work. “We” isn’t just Dole and his staff; it pulls reporters and photographers into the same assembly line, collaborators in manufacturing a scene that will outlive whatever verbiage gets spoken on-site.
The second sentence lands like a wink and a warning. Dole, a famously blunt, self-aware figure, is acknowledging the asymmetry between performance and meaning. He’s also quietly managing risk: if the sound bite is messy, the photo still communicates discipline, vigor, authority. In an era when a candidate’s “look” can stabilize a narrative better than a paragraph of nuance, the image becomes the message - and the message becomes optional.
The subtext is darker than it sounds. If you “don’t worry” about what he says, you also don’t have to hold him to it. The joke doubles as an indictment of the incentives that reward optics over accountability. Coming from Dole, a World War II veteran turned Senate workhorse, it reads less like cynicism for its own sake than a veteran’s shrug: this is the system we built, and everyone in the room already knows the assignment.
The second sentence lands like a wink and a warning. Dole, a famously blunt, self-aware figure, is acknowledging the asymmetry between performance and meaning. He’s also quietly managing risk: if the sound bite is messy, the photo still communicates discipline, vigor, authority. In an era when a candidate’s “look” can stabilize a narrative better than a paragraph of nuance, the image becomes the message - and the message becomes optional.
The subtext is darker than it sounds. If you “don’t worry” about what he says, you also don’t have to hold him to it. The joke doubles as an indictment of the incentives that reward optics over accountability. Coming from Dole, a World War II veteran turned Senate workhorse, it reads less like cynicism for its own sake than a veteran’s shrug: this is the system we built, and everyone in the room already knows the assignment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Instagram Captions |
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