Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Gibbs

The clunky double-negative is doing political work. Gibbs is defending the Obama-era auto bailout not as a feel-good rescue but as a grim, grown-up act of damage control: the kind of decision you take when the alternative is catastrophe and history won’t wait for perfect messaging. The phrase "may not have been the most popular thing to do" nods to the public’s moral outrage at saving big corporations, then pivots hard to "but it was the right thing to do" - a classic technocrat’s absolution, where "right" is measured less by fairness than by macroeconomic triage.

The specific intent is reputational: to reframe an intervention that looked like rewarding failure into a story of preventing mass suffering. Notice the implied timeline: recession versus Great Depression. By invoking the Depression, Gibbs reaches for the most culturally loaded economic scarecrow available, turning a policy argument into a referendum on national trauma. That move widens the moral perimeter: if the stakes are existential, you don’t litigate the optics, you stop the bleeding.

Subtext: democracy is bad at emergency decisions. "Popular" becomes shorthand for emotional, punitive, and short-term; "right" stands in for expert judgment, long-term stability, and the uncomfortable reality that in a crisis, government ends up insuring systems it doesn’t fully control. It’s also a quiet defense of elite stewardship: trust us, you didn’t see the spreadsheet, you saw the headline.

Context matters because the auto industry wasn’t just symbolic; it was supply chains, union jobs, Midwestern identity, and a financial system already in free fall. Gibbs is selling a narrative where the bailout isn’t corporate charity - it’s social shock absorption.