Politics & Power Quote by Kit Bond

A “battle” is doing a lot of work here: it turns the slow grind of deindustrialization, trade shocks, and corporate cost-cutting into a war story with clear heroes and implied enemies. Kit Bond, a Republican politician shaped by late-20th-century fights over globalization and regulation, isn’t just praising labor. He’s drafting workers into a political narrative where anxiety about job security becomes a mandate for action - typically protection, procurement rules, or “fair trade” rhetoric that can live comfortably inside a pro-business party.

The second sentence is strategic flattery with a purpose. “Finest workers in the world” signals: your struggles aren’t your fault. The subtext is absolution. If you’re unemployed or underpaid, it’s not because you failed; it’s because the field is rigged - by foreign competition, bad trade deals, or Washington’s negligence, depending on the day’s talking points. That emotional move matters because it preempts the harshest implication of market logic: that losing jobs might reflect diminished value. Bond refuses that premise outright.

Then he narrows the camera to “grow, harvest, and mine” - sectors loaded with regional and cultural meaning. It’s a quiet map of political America: farms, extraction towns, and the “real economy” that candidates invoke to counter the abstract world of finance and coastal professional work. By emphasizing raw materials - “highest quality and most plentiful” - Bond frames the nation as inherently rich, productive, and deserving, implying that any economic pain is a policy failure, not a reality to accept. The rhetoric is reassurance disguised as mobilization.