Leadership Quote by Susan Davis

“San Diego walked away with just a scratch” is the kind of civic shorthand politicians love: a whole crisis compressed into a reassuring sound bite. Susan Davis, a long-serving San Diego-area congresswoman, is almost certainly invoking a moment when the city faced a tangible threat - wildfire, earthquake, economic shock, military or security incident - and emerged largely intact. The line is engineered to do two things at once: acknowledge that something real happened (“a scratch” admits damage) while insisting it never rose to the level of catastrophe (it’s only a scratch).

The intent is stabilizing. It tells constituents: I saw the danger, I measured the impact, and I’m here to report we’re okay. That matters in politics because panic is contagious, and so is blame. By personifying the city - San Diego “walked away” - Davis turns a municipal system into a single body with agency, resilience, even luck. It’s comforting, but it’s also strategic: if the city is a unified survivor, then political leadership can share in the credit of survival.

The subtext is what gets left out. “Just a scratch” can quietly minimize the uneven distribution of harm: the neighborhoods that flooded, the families displaced, the small businesses that never reopened. It’s a phrase that smooths jagged outcomes into a clean narrative of toughness. In context, it likely functioned as an argument for preparedness, funding, or policy continuity: we made it through this time; invest in the choices that kept the damage small.