Leadership Quote by Jane Harman

Power doesn’t sound like power when a woman in politics claims it outright, so Harman does something more strategic: she frames toughness as conditional. “Aggressive” is the loaded word - coded, gendered, and routinely used to sand down female ambition into a personality flaw. By putting it in the first person (“I think I am”), she both owns the label and softens it, as if anticipating the eye-roll of punditry. It’s a small rhetorical sleight of hand: accept the critique before your opponents can weaponize it.

The second clause is the tell. “Critical when it’s necessary” is an appeal to judgment, not temperament. She’s not promising constant combat; she’s asserting discretion. That “when” does a lot of political labor, positioning her as someone who can switch modes: supportive teammate in public, hard-edged interrogator in the hearing room. It’s also a bid for legitimacy in the national-security lane Harman often occupied, where “aggressive” reads less like rudeness and more like vigilance.

Subtext: don’t confuse my willingness to fight with an inability to govern. Harman is threading the needle between two punishments women leaders routinely face - being dismissed as soft if they’re civil, or vilified as shrill if they’re forceful. The line is engineered to reassure centrists and insiders alike: she’ll press, but she won’t burn the institution down to do it. That’s not just personality branding; it’s survival politics.