Politics & Power Quote by Jane Harman

Credit-taking is rarely subtle in Washington, but Harman makes it sound almost bureaucratically inevitable. Her line is built to do two things at once: claim authorship and launder partisanship into “structure.” By saying “a lot of the things that we’ve been able to do” were Democratic ideas, she’s staking out a quiet victory lap without sounding like she’s spiking the football. The phrasing is inclusive - “we’ve been able” - a strategic blur that invites bipartisan buy-in while still labeling the underlying blueprint as Democratic.

The real payload is the example she chooses: “the structure for this new director of national intelligence.” That post was born from the post-9/11 consensus that the intelligence community was too siloed, too competitive, too proud to share. Harman’s reference cues a very specific context: the early-2000s reform wave (9/11 Commission recommendations, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act) when Democrats were eager to be seen as serious about national security, not just civil liberties or anti-war skepticism. She’s rebutting the standard Republican monopoly on toughness by arguing that security architecture itself can be a Democratic innovation.

Subtext: Democrats didn’t just vote for reforms; they supplied the governing concept. And because she stresses “structure,” she’s implying something more durable than policy mood swings - institutions, chain of command, coordination. It’s a politician’s way of saying: this wasn’t improvisation, it was design.