Leadership Quote by Don Nickles

“I still happen to think” is doing more work here than the flag-waving punchline. Don Nickles isn’t offering a chest-thumping verdict so much as a calibrated reassurance: a veteran politician signaling steadiness to audiences who care about capital flows, risk, and predictability. The hedged confidence matters. “Still” implies a challenge already on the table - recession anxiety, globalization jitters, offshoring fears, maybe a crisis of faith in American competitiveness. It’s a verbal stake in the ground planted after someone has kicked dirt over it.

The line’s intent is transactional as much as patriotic. By framing the U.S. as “the greatest place…to invest,” Nickles collapses national greatness into an investor’s checklist: stable institutions, enforceable contracts, deep markets, innovation, a consumer base big enough to justify scale. It’s less about moral exceptionalism than about an ecosystem where money can move, multiply, and be protected.

The subtext is political triage. If investors are spooked, jobs follow. So the sentence is also an argument for policy continuity - tax structures, deregulation, trade posture - without naming any of it. “Happen to think” softens ideology into common sense, a way to make a pro-business stance sound like an observation any reasonable person would share.

Contextually, it sits in that late-20th/early-21st-century genre of American leadership: managing confidence as a public good. When markets run on sentiment, optimism becomes policy.