Politics & Power Quote by Max Cleland

Cleland’s line is a defensive strike disguised as a truism: a veteran insisting that service is bigger than party, right when party often tries to claim it. Coming from a politician who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam and later served as a Democratic senator, the sentence reads less like civics-class uplift than a hard-earned boundary. He’s telling the audience: don’t you dare turn my body, my comrades, or the uniform into a campaign prop.

The phrasing is doing careful rhetorical work. “Being a soldier” isn’t the same as “supporting the troops.” It’s identity and obligation, not a slogan. “Fighting for this country” invokes sacrifice without specifying a particular war, letting the moral authority of service stand apart from any single conflict’s popularity. Then he lands the punch: “neither Republican nor Democrat.” The parallelism is blunt on purpose, flattening partisan hierarchy and denying anyone ownership.

The subtext is also about suspicion. In modern U.S. politics, patriotism gets litigated like a credential. Cleland is pushing back against the reflex to treat military service as proof of ideological purity, and against the equally cynical move of attacking opponents as unpatriotic. He’s arguing for a civic commons where sacrifice isn’t a talking point.

Context matters: Cleland lived through the Vietnam era’s rupture and, decades later, the post-9/11 temptation to wrap policy debates in flag-draped immunity. The quote works because it’s both ethical claim and warning: once service becomes partisan, the country stops being the thing everyone is allegedly fighting for.