Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

The remark satirizes modern electoral politics as performance rather than governance. By calling politicians “yo-yos,” Bellow suggests they are lightweight, repetitive, and easily manipulated—rising and falling with fashion rather than principle. The presidency, in this view, has been reduced to a hybrid of a popularity contest and a schoolroom exercise in canned argument, where victory goes not to depth of thought but to the most fluent deployment of ready-made slogans (“an encyclopedia of clichés”). The line fits Bellow’s broader skepticism about mass culture and public language: when political speech becomes formulaic, it deadens judgment and substitutes image-management for serious moral and intellectual leadership.