Politics & Power Quote by Debbie Wasserman Schultz

A politician’s boast is never just a victory lap; it’s a preemptive strike on the next campaign’s weak spot. Debbie Wasserman Schultz frames “turned the economy around” as an ownership claim, not a description. The verb “turned” suggests decisive steering, a leader’s hand on the wheel, and it’s paired with “proudly run” to signal confidence in terrain Democrats often lose: kitchen-table economics. The line isn’t aimed at wonks; it’s aimed at voters who remember the crash and want a clear story about who grabbed the fire extinguisher.

The subtext is an argument about credit and blame. By tethering the recovery to “our policies under President Obama’s leadership,” she collapses a messy, multi-causal rebound into a partisan narrative with a single protagonist. “Recovery Act” functions as shorthand for technocratic competence: stimulus, jobs, stabilization. “Investing in the automobile industry” is the emotional clincher, a concrete symbol that swaps abstract GDP talk for factories, paychecks, and a rescued icon of American manufacturing. It also stakes out the most politically useful kind of intervention: targeted, visible, and plausibly temporary.

Context matters: this is post-2008 crisis messaging in a country still suspicious of bailouts and big government. Schultz is trying to launder “government intervention” into “practical problem-solving,” while daring opponents to argue, implicitly, that the auto rescue should have failed. The intent is less persuasion than alignment: give Democratic voters a script, and force the election to be a referendum on competence rather than ideology.