Politics & Power Quote by Howard Coble

Twenty years is supposed to mellow a person, sand down ideology into pragmatism. Howard Coble’s line flips that expectation into a credential: longevity as proof that the catechism still holds. The intent is less to persuade skeptics than to reassure allies that experience hasn’t diluted the brand. “Still believe” does a lot of work here. It frames small government and low taxes as convictions tested by time, not merely partisan talking points, and it subtly casts opponents as either naive or fickle.

The subtext is institutional. After two decades watching budgets, committees, and lobbyists grind policy into sausage, Coble doesn’t claim he discovered a new lever; he claims the old levers remain the only ones worth pulling. That’s a conservative posture in the literal sense: the highest compliment you can pay an idea is that it survived exposure to Washington. It also immunizes him against the common charge that long-serving members become captives of big government. He’s saying: I’ve been inside the machine and I’m not seduced.

Context matters: Coble’s career ran through the Reagan tax-cut era, the Gingrich revolution, post-9/11 security expansions, and repeated deficit fights. “Smaller government” in that timeline reads less like an empirical claim than a moral one - a preference for restraint, suspicion of bureaucratic growth, and a promise to prioritize private-sector autonomy. “Most effective economic policies” is the rhetorical pivot: it smuggles values in under the language of results, turning ideology into common sense.