Leadership Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

A warning dressed up as bookkeeping, this line turns national anxiety into a spreadsheet that voters can feel in their gut. Boehlert doesn’t sell an apocalypse; he sells a trajectory: “only going to get worse” repeated twice like a metronome. The rhetoric matters. By framing oil and trade as parallel, worsening trends, he fuses energy policy with economic patriotism. Oil isn’t just fuel here; it’s a leak in the hull, a recurring payment to someone else, a structural dependency that shows up as a deficit.

The pivot word is “so.” It’s the politician’s version of inevitability: if the premise is accepted, the prescription becomes “common sense” rather than ideology. Notice what he doesn’t say. There’s no sermon about conservation as virtue, no climate language, no moralizing about lifestyles. The target is “growth” in consumption, not consumption itself, and especially not domestic production. That’s a careful triangulation: he can sound tough on vulnerability without sounding like he’s coming for your car keys.

The subtext is post-1970s energy trauma filtered through late-20th/early-21st-century globalization: oil shocks, OPEC leverage, and the dawning realization that energy dependence is foreign policy dependence. By zeroing in on “imported oil consumption,” he signals a preference for efficiency, alternatives, and possibly regulation, while leaving room for a pro-business, pro-domestic-energy coalition. It’s constraint politics: admit the limits, then rebrand restraint as strategy.