Politics & Power Quote by John McHugh

Procedural optimism is the politician's safest kind of promise, and John McHugh leans into it like a well-worn script. The sentence is engineered to sound like momentum: passed the House, next the Senate, then Conference, then resolution, then "reality". It's a conveyor belt of civic process, each step invoked to imply inevitability without committing to what, exactly, will be inevitable.

The specific intent is twofold. First, to declare progress in a way that reassures stakeholders who fear change (postal unions, rural constituents, business mailers) while signaling seriousness to fiscal hawks who see the Postal Service as a budget problem. Second, to reframe compromise as competence. "Conference" is insider baseball, but it's deployed here as a magic room where "outstanding issues" get tidied up, not fought over. That phrase sanitizes the messy core of postal reform: labor costs, service obligations, retirement prefunding, and the political pain of closing facilities that communities treat like civic birthrights.

The subtext is: we're not done negotiating, and that's not a flaw. By promising that outstanding issues will be "resolved", McHugh preemptively casts future concessions as sensible housekeeping rather than ideological retreat. The closing flourish, "for the Postal Service and for all Americans", broadens a technocratic bill into a populist benefit, laundering a narrow policy fight into national interest. It's rhetorical insulation: if you oppose the final deal, you're not just quibbling over line items; you're standing in the way of "reality" and the people it supposedly serves.