Leadership Quote by Norm Dicks

A number like this isn’t meant to inform; it’s meant to land like a shove. Norm Dicks, a career appropriator and Boeing’s hometown congressman in all but name, uses the most bloodless metric imaginable - order value - to tell a story of national stakes: America is slipping, Europe is eating our lunch, and somebody in Washington needs to start acting like it.

The specificity of “In 2003” does a lot of quiet work. It frames the claim as a snapshot from a bad year rather than a settled trend, inviting the listener to treat the gap as an alarm bell, not a verdict. It also subtly reroutes attention away from the messy causes - post-9/11 aviation slump, airline bankruptcies, defense-versus-commercial cycles, currency advantages - toward a clean, moralized scoreboard. “More than twice” is the rhetorical haymaker: it’s not a marginal loss you can rationalize; it’s a humiliation.

The subtext is coalition politics dressed up as competitiveness. If Airbus is winning orders, then Boeing’s supply chain in Washington state and beyond is at risk, along with union jobs and the tax base. That makes the policy ask - export financing, trade enforcement, R&D support, procurement leverage - feel less like corporate favoritism and more like industrial triage. Dicks isn’t praising Airbus so much as constructing a permission slip for intervention: when the market looks like a rout, government action can be sold as patriotism, not protectionism.