Wealth & Money Quote by Ken Buck

The tell is in the opening: "I think women as well as men..". It’s the kind of prefacing politicians use when they’re trying to back out of a rhetorical corner without admitting they were ever in one. Ken Buck’s sentence strains to rebut a familiar stereotype in American campaigns: that women vote on "women’s issues" while men vote on the "real" stuff - jobs, spending, the economy. The intent is corrective, but the subtext betrays the anxiety behind it. You don’t reassure people you respect their priorities unless you’ve been accused, implicitly or explicitly, of not respecting them.

The clumsy repetition ("and, and", "they, they") reads less like sincerity than like live damage control: a spoken scramble to sound inclusive while staying inside the safe conservative frame of economic grievance. Notice what’s absent. There’s no mention of health care, abortion, childcare, workplace discrimination - the issues that often define the gender gap. By widening the lens to "jobs and the economy", Buck flattens difference into sameness, pitching a unisex version of concern that conveniently avoids contentious policy terrain.

The generational invocation - "our grandparents" - is the emotional anchor. It’s not a policy argument so much as a nostalgia claim: America used to hand out opportunity; now it doesn’t; your kids are the proof. That move works because it turns economic unease into a moral inheritance story, one that invites women in not by addressing their specific stakes, but by insisting they share the same threatened promise.