Leadership Quote by Roy Romer

Power, in Romer’s framing, isn’t going to be seized so much as swiped. The line is almost disarmingly bland, which is part of its political craft: it smuggles a theory of change into an economic truism. “Big force” evokes history’s usual suspects - armies, unions, courts, parties - then quietly replaces them with the checkout line. In a single breath, Romer relocates agency from institutions to households, from speeches to spending, from ideology to purchasing decisions.

The intent reads like a centrist governor’s north star: follow the demand. Romer (a New Democrat-era figure, governing Colorado through the 1980s and early 1990s) was shaped by a period when politicians sold competence and growth, and when globalization and deregulation were recasting what government could plausibly control. Saying consumer buying power is the main force signals a pragmatic wager: if you want jobs, innovation, and political stability, you nurture consumers’ ability to spend - wages, confidence, credit, cost of living. It’s an argument for economic policy that treats the public less as citizens to be mobilized and more as a market to be sustained.

The subtext is both empowering and evasive. Empowering, because it flatters ordinary people as the drivers of outcomes. Evasive, because it shifts responsibility away from concentrated power - corporate strategy, labor conditions, public investment - toward individual choice. If the “big force” is consumer buying power, then inequality becomes a demand problem, not a bargaining problem; politics becomes a matter of maintaining purchasing capacity, not restructuring who sets the terms. It’s democracy translated into dollars: one person, one vote, weighted by disposable income.