Politics & Power Quote by Norm Dicks

“Obviously” is doing the heavy lifting here: Norm Dicks isn’t merely arguing, he’s trying to close the argument before it starts. In a congressional setting, that one word is a power move, framing the proposed $60 million cut to the National Endowment for the Arts as so self-evidently reckless that only someone unserious - or ideologically committed to austerity theater - would dispute it. The address, “Mr. Chairman,” signals ritual deference, but it also locates the real audience: committee members who can be nudged, shamed, or politically inoculated with the right talking point.

Calling the cut a “disaster” is deliberate escalation. It’s not “unfortunate,” not “harmful,” but catastrophic language meant to re-scale a budget line item into a civic injury. That matters because arts funding fights are rarely about the spreadsheet. They’re proxy wars over what the federal government should be allowed to value, especially when opponents can brand arts grants as elitist, frivolous, or culturally suspect. Dicks’ phrasing tries to preempt that framing: if the cut is a disaster, then the NEA isn’t a luxury; it’s infrastructure.

The subtext is political triage. $60 million is small in federal terms, which is exactly why the cut is attractive as symbolism. Dicks’ warning suggests he understands the NEA’s real vulnerability: not the dollar amount, but the precedent. Once you define arts support as expendable, you’ve handed your opponents a cultural wedge they can keep swinging.