Politics & Power Quote by Rick Perry

Victory, in Rick Perry's telling, is best measured by the sound of desk drawers sliding shut. The line is a chest-thumping post-election flourish, but it works because it performs two moves at once: it claims a mandate and it frames that mandate as a purge. "Winning offices" is procedural and democratic; "cleaning out their desks" is vivid, personal, almost cinematic. It turns a policy dispute into a scene of eviction, inviting supporters to enjoy not just triumph but turnover.

The intent is clear: consolidate a conservative moment by defining the opponent as illegitimate or at least overdue for removal. Perry doesn't say "Democrats" or even "liberals"; he says "champions of big government", a label that compresses a sprawling political coalition into a single villain: the bureaucratic state. That phrase does subtextual work. It implies that big government isn't merely a set of policies but a crusade, driven by self-interested "champions" who need to be sent packing. It's a rhetorical shortcut that makes cuts, deregulation, and austerity feel like moral housekeeping.

Contextually, it fits the era's small-government theater: post-Obama backlash, Tea Party energy, and a Republican brand built on depicting Washington as both incompetent and predatory. The punchline is that the machinery of governance doesn't shrink just because its operators change. Still, Perry's line succeeds as political storytelling: elections become a cleansing ritual, and ideology becomes a moving truck.