Politics & Power Quote by Scott McCallum

McCallum’s line is the kind of populist pivot every modern politician keeps within arm’s reach: reframe policy as a moral choice between “working people and taxpayers” and “government and government officials.” The intent is straightforward - claim the democratic high ground by positioning himself as translator and defender of the everyday citizen, while casting the state as a self-interested actor that needs supervision. It’s an argument about legitimacy more than budgets.

The subtext does a lot of work. “Working people” and “taxpayers” sound like neutral categories, but they’re coded as the deserving public: productive, responsible, put-upon. The phrase quietly narrows who counts as “the public” while turning “government” into a separate species, a class with its own incentives. That separation is rhetorical gold: if government is “them,” then cuts, privatization, and deregulation become not just technical reforms but an ethical rebalancing.

The construction also dodges specifics. “Look at things from the perspective of…” is a soft command that invites agreement without naming the hard trade-offs (whose taxes, which services, what risks get shifted onto individuals). It’s a way to pre-sell austerity or “efficiency” as empathy.

Contextually, McCallum comes out of the late-20th-century Midwestern Republican ecosystem, where suspicion of bureaucracy and appeals to the taxpayer were central political currency. The line taps that era’s durable storyline: government isn’t the instrument of the people, it’s a suspect institution that must be forced to remember who pays the bill.