Politics & Power Quote by Bruce Babbitt

Babbitt is doing two things at once: laundering a bureaucratic legacy into a heroic story, and offering a carefully calibrated compliment that still centers his own role. The opening stack - "Protecting all this land, working with the President" - frames conservation as an active, muscular verb, not paperwork. It invites listeners to picture a frontier-scale struggle, even though the actual mechanism is mostly executive authority, agency process, and legal drafting.

The little verbal stumbles ("to, you know... I think") are part of the persuasion. They perform humility and spontaneity, signaling that the claim is so obvious it almost escapes polish. That matters because the next line is audacious: "second to no one in this century". It's a sweeping superlative that risks sounding partisan or inflated, so he softens it with a hedge ("I think") and then legitimizes it with a single, high-prestige comparison: Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt functions here as conservation's patron saint and bipartisan shield. By invoking him, Babbitt elevates Clinton-era monument designations into the mythic American tradition of big public lands, while also sidestepping the fights that surrounded those designations - Western backlash, property-rights politics, and accusations of federal overreach. The subtext is: if you're criticizing these monuments, you're not just opposing an administration; you're opposing an American ideal.

It's also a subtle insider signal. Babbitt, a key architect of those moves as Interior Secretary, is writing the score for how history should remember the period: not as culture-war land grabs, but as Roosevelt-scale stewardship.