Politics & Power Quote by Christine Gregoire

A neat piece of political aikido: Gregoire concedes the small-government talking point, then pivots to claim the larger terrain. “For the most part, this is true” functions as a rhetorical pressure release valve. It disarms the reflexive accusation that Democrats think bureaucracy is an employment agency, while signaling to business-friendly moderates that she speaks their language. The sentence that follows is the real argument, and it’s crafted to sound less like ideology than like common sense: government as “environment,” not engine.

That word choice matters. “Environment” suggests conditions you can’t individualize away - infrastructure, schools, public health, predictable regulation, courts, ports, broadband, research funding. It reframes state action from meddling to enabling, turning taxes and rules into the invisible scaffolding of private-sector risk-taking. The subtext is a rebuttal to austerity politics: you can chant “business creates jobs” all day, but without stable inputs and fair refereeing, businesses don’t “excel,” they hoard cash, consolidate, or relocate.

The context is late-2000s/early-2010s economic messaging, when governors had to sell stimulus-era spending, workforce investment, and public works as pro-growth rather than pro-government. Gregoire, a Washington State executive steeped in the Microsoft/Amazon ecosystem and trade logistics, isn’t romanticizing markets; she’s bargaining with them. The line implicitly defines the social contract: let entrepreneurs take the credit for hiring, but don’t pretend the playing field appears by magic.