Leadership Quote by David E. Price

In David E. Price's line, you can hear the practiced realism of a governing insider who’s seen both the usefulness and the limits of party muscle. The opening clause nods to an unromantic truth: Congress runs on parties. They organize priorities, impose discipline, and translate elections into action. Price isn’t pining for some misty bipartisan past; he’s conceding that strong parties are the machinery of modern legislating.

Then he slips in the warning. "But" is doing the heavy lifting, reframing strength as a potential trap. Budget and entitlement policy - code for Social Security, Medicare, debt ceilings, and the slow grind of demographics - isn’t just hard because of ideology. It’s hard because the costs are concentrated, the pain is immediate, and the payoff is mostly invisible. Pure partisan exertion can win messaging wars and score cable-news points, but it’s structurally ill-suited to problems that demand shared ownership of unpopular choices.

The subtext is protective: without cross-party capacity, Congress becomes a stage for blame rather than a site of responsibility. Price is also signaling to his own institution that legitimacy is at stake. When entitlement math collides with partisan identity, the temptation is to promise everything, cut nothing, and accuse the other side of cruelty. His intent is to carve out a rhetorical middle lane: keep parties strong enough to govern, but build procedural and cultural room for coalition-making when the numbers stop caring about ideology.