Leadership Quote by Bob Schaffer

“Record” is the tell here: it’s a prosecutor’s word repurposed as a political weapon. Bob Schaffer isn’t critiquing a single decision by Salazar; he’s trying to freeze an entire tenure into a simple, jury-friendly narrative. “Weakness” does the heavy lifting. It’s vague enough to be irrefutable in a cable-news segment and emotionally legible to voters primed to equate strength with safety. In that framing, an attorney general’s nuances - civil liberties, settlement strategy, prioritization, the slow grind of institutional reform - become liabilities. The job gets translated into a masculinity test.

The second clause tightens the vise. “He hasn’t been a good attorney general” sounds measured, almost bureaucratic, but it’s the kind of understatement that invites listeners to fill in harsher conclusions: soft on crime, captive to special interests, absent in crisis. It’s also a deliberate demotion. Salazar may have other political brands (reformer, consensus-builder, Western pragmatist), and Schaffer insists on judging him only by the office’s most performative expectations: toughness, confrontation, visible enforcement.

Contextually, this is how down-ballot executive roles get nationalized. Attorney general races often become proxy battles over immigration, drugs, or culture-war flashpoints, and “weakness” is a shortcut to that whole bundle without naming any policy that could be debated on facts. The intent isn’t to persuade skeptics; it’s to supply supporters with a clean slogan that turns governance into a gut-check.