Leadership Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

The number lands like a quiet indictment: not “some families,” not “too many,” but 17,000 households. Patrick J. Kennedy isn’t reaching for poetry here; he’s reaching for a ledger entry that’s hard to wave away. The specificity is the point. It smuggles urgency into an otherwise abstract policy conversation and dares the listener to treat hunger as anything other than a measurable, governable failure.

“As a regular basis” does important work. It reframes hunger from a rare tragedy to a recurring condition, something structural rather than episodic. That phrase resists the comforting narrative that food insecurity is solved by holiday drives or one-time charity. It implies instability: a refrigerator that empties predictably, a paycheck that doesn’t stretch, a system that repeatedly lets people fall through.

The subtext is political as much as moral. By anchoring the crisis “in my state,” Kennedy claims jurisdiction and accountability while also building a local mandate. This isn’t a distant problem for someone else’s district; it’s happening under the watch of the people he represents and the institutions he’s trying to move. The line is crafted to justify intervention: expanded nutrition assistance, wage policy, housing relief, mental health and addiction services, or any of the interconnected levers that determine whether a household eats.

Coming from a Kennedy, the statement also quietly invokes legacy: public service as a promise measured in living conditions, not slogans. The rhetorical strategy is simple, modern, and ruthless: count the harm, then ask why it’s tolerated.