Leadership Quote by Greg Walden

Power, in Walden's framing, is less a moral category than a volume discount. "Large corporations and unions" get paired like mirror images: two antagonists in American politics, suddenly presented as twins in the same strategy. That's not accidental. It smuggles in a populist-sounding critique of bigness while staying safely noncommittal about which side deserves suspicion. Everyone who's "big enough" is implied to be playing the same game.

The diction does quiet work. "Know the power" casts size as expertise, even inevitability, and "bargain for better rates" sanitizes what could be called leverage, pressure, or muscle. "Rates" is technocratic and bloodless - it could mean health insurance premiums, wages, supplier contracts, shipping, interest. That vagueness broadens the target and dodges specifics: you can hear it as a warning about monopolistic corporations, or as a jab at organized labor's negotiating clout, or both.

Contextually, Walden's era of Republican policymaking is saturated with debates over collective bargaining, the Affordable Care Act, and the role of "big" actors that can distort markets. The line plants a seed: if scale produces bargaining power, then consolidation - whether corporate mergers or union density - becomes a political problem to be managed or curtailed. Subtext: the little guy doesn't lose because he's lazy; he loses because he's small. That diagnosis can justify very different prescriptions, but the rhetorical advantage is clear: it recasts ideological fights as simple math.