Politics & Power Quote by Carol Moseley Braun

There’s a quiet trapdoor in Moseley Braun’s phrasing: she turns dismissal into credential. “I’m used to” lands like a shrug, but it’s really an indictment of the political gaze - who gets seen, who gets presumed competent, who must audition for seriousness. By putting “underestimating me” next to “not paying me a whole lot of attention,” she exposes how invisibility and condescension work together. The slight isn’t just personal; it’s structural.

The pivot word is “frankly.” It signals candor while daring the listener to admit what polite politics prefers to euphemize: that belief itself is a gatekeeping mechanism. Campaigns are supposedly about platforms and experience, yet she identifies the real hurdle as permission - the public’s willingness to imagine her in the role. “A big challenge is to have people believe” is less about her self-doubt than about the electorate’s bias, and the media’s habit of treating certain candidacies as symbolic, quixotic, or “historic” before they’re treated as viable.

Context matters: Moseley Braun was the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate and later ran for president in a field and era still dominated by white male default settings. The line compresses that reality into a single, strategic appeal: judge me by the job, not by your expectations. It’s a campaign argument disguised as a personal confession, and it works because it forces the audience to confront their own reluctance as the real opposition.