Leadership Quote by Laura Miller

“Dallas is a great city, and it’s worth fighting for” is campaign language that borrows the moral gravity of wartime rhetoric while staying safely local. The first clause is pure affirmation: not “improving,” not “complicated,” but “great,” a word that does civic work. It flatters residents, recruits the undecided, and preempts criticism by making pride the default setting. If you disagree, you’re not just nitpicking policy - you’re undermining the city’s identity.

The second clause sharpens the blade. “Worth fighting for” is deliberately elastic: it can mean legislative battles, court fights, budget showdowns, even street-level debates over policing, housing, or schools. It frames politics as defense, not experimentation, implying an outside threat or an internal decay that requires resolve. That’s the subtext: something is at stake, and the speaker is positioning herself as the person willing to take the punches.

In a place like Dallas - shorthand for booming development, stark inequality, culture-war flashpoints, and constant reinvention - the line functions as a coalition pitch. “Great” speaks to boosters, business interests, and long-time loyalists; “fighting” signals to constituents who feel left out of the prosperity story that someone will actually contest power on their behalf. The genius is its ambiguity. It lets listeners project their own Dallas onto the sentence, then invites them to enlist.