Politics & Power Quote by John Breaux

Bipartisanship is doing double duty here: it reads as statesmanship, but it also functions as political insurance. John Breaux is selling a process, not a policy. By naming Tom Daschle first, he signals loyalty to Democratic leadership and labor-aligned constituencies. In the next breath he widens the circle to Republican leaders and “the president,” a phrase that deliberately flattens partisan hierarchy into a single negotiating table. That’s the rhetorical trick: everyone gets thanked in advance, so no one can later claim they were shut out.

The key softener is “try,” a word that anticipates failure and assigns it to circumstance rather than character. If talks collapse, Breaux can point to effort; if they succeed, he can claim authorship of the grown-up outcome. The line “something that we can all be proud of” is classic legislative language with a hidden purpose. “Proud” is moral vocabulary, not technical vocabulary. It shifts evaluation away from concrete trade-offs (who pays, who loses, what’s watered down) and toward an affective consensus, a feeling of responsible governance. That’s especially useful in the Senate, where big reforms often survive only by becoming ambiguous enough for multiple sides to declare victory.

Contextually, Breaux’s career brand was the centrist dealmaker, the kind of Democrat who treated cross-party bargaining as both ideology and survival strategy. The quote signals: expect compromise, expect a coalition, and don’t expect purity.