Leadership Quote by John M. McHugh

“Far removed” is the politician’s cleanest weapon: it sounds like neutral description while quietly drafting an indictment. John M. McHugh’s line frames the Postal Service not as a beloved civic fixture under stress, but as an institution that has drifted so dramatically that old rules have become absurd. The key move is temporal triangulation. By pointing to “30 years ago” and naming “reform,” he invokes a bygone moment of bipartisan seriousness, then implies we’ve been coasting on outdated assumptions ever since. It’s nostalgia with a policy purpose.

The specific intent is to create permission for intervention. If today’s USPS is structurally different, then protecting it with yesterday’s playbook becomes not just ineffective but irresponsible. That’s a subtle way to pre-empt defenders of the status quo: you’re not resisting change, you’re resisting reality. It also plays well in a legislative setting, where “reform” is a moralized noun - it connotes modernization, efficiency, and adult supervision without specifying the pain points (service cuts, labor fights, rural access) that “reform” often hides.

The subtext is economic and technological disruption: email and e-commerce have flipped the business model, first hollowing out first-class mail, then flooding the system with packages. Saying the service is “far removed” cues listeners to accept that a public mandate may now require private-sector logic - or at least private-sector metrics. Contextually, it’s a bipartisan signal flare: the speaker is not attacking the USPS outright; he’s building the narrative scaffolding that makes structural changes sound inevitable rather than ideological.