Leadership Quote by George W. Bush

A neat little shiv disguised as a folksy observation, Bush's line works because it turns experience - normally a credential - into evidence of moral mush. "Long enough" is doing heavy lifting: it paints Washington not as a place where you learn complexity, but as a swamp that teaches you to hedge. The joke lands in the rhythm of certainty versus calculation, a contrast Bush's 2004 campaign wanted to make feel visceral: he is the decider; Kerry is the weathervane.

The specific intent is to brand Kerry as a habitual flip-flopper without litigating policy details. "Just about every issue" is classic political hyperbole, but it's useful hyperbole: it invites the audience to supply their own example (Iraq, taxes, trade, you name it) and to feel like the pattern is obvious. The accusation is also safely unfalsifiable. Even if Kerry can justify one shift, the charge is about disposition, not a single vote.

The subtext is anti-elite populism in compact form. Washington "long enough" suggests insider contamination: too many meetings, too many donors, too much parsing. Bush doesn't have to argue that Kerry's positions are wrong - only that they're strategic, the product of ambition rather than conviction. In a post-9/11 election framed around resolve, that insinuation mattered.

Context sharpens the blade. Kerry's nuanced Iraq record made him vulnerable to caricature; Bush's own policy reversals were harder to punch up because he projected consistency as a character trait. This line sells character as policy: certainty becomes the credential, and complexity becomes suspect.