Politics & Power Quote by Charlie Norwood

Norwood is doing that classic Washington jujitsu: shrinking himself to make the crowd feel larger. "Not me" is less humility than strategy. It’s a permission slip for listeners to believe their frustration has leverage, and it inoculates him against the suspicion that this is just another politician chasing a win. By framing the outcome as inevitable - "going to win this" - he borrows the rhetoric of a populist uprising while keeping the action safely inside the system: mail, not marches; pressure, not disruption.

The real pivot is the way he defines "Average Americans". It’s an elastic category that flatters the listener and implicitly excludes the villains without naming them. You can hear the unspoken antagonists: insurers, drug companies, committee chairs, the machinery that kills reform in slow motion. He broadens the coalition to include "providers of health care", a subtle tell that the fight is over policy that affects doctors and patients alike, likely in the orbit of patients' rights and managed-care backlash that surged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Norwood helped lead that charge.)

"Keep sending those cards and letters" is both a tactical instruction and a political confession. He’s admitting that inside-the-Beltway arguments aren’t enough; what moves votes is the visible, countable proof of public attention. Cards and letters become a currency lawmakers can spend against lobbyists: tangible cover for doing something risky. The line isn’t romantic about democracy. It’s procedural, even transactional. And that’s why it lands: it tells ordinary people their influence isn’t abstract - it’s measurable, stackable, deliverable.