Politics & Power Quote by Cliff Stearns

A politician’s greatest magic trick is turning a moving target into a fixed starting line, and Cliff Stearns does it here with a deceptively clean roll call of good news. The list reads like a State of the Union in miniature: jobs up, income up, education up, homeownership up, crime down. The rhetoric is built to feel empirical, not ideological. Short sentences. No caveats. No named policies. Just metrics, stacked like receipts.

The intent is less to inform than to certify. By anchoring everything to “Since 1994,” Stearns quietly defines 1994 as the “before” and whatever comes after as the “after” worth crediting. That year isn’t neutral: it cues a partisan memory (the Republican wave, the Contract with America, a new governing posture) without having to say “Republicans did this.” It’s a time stamp that smuggles in authorship.

The subtext is triangulation-by-numbers: if all the key indicators are improving, then calls for major structural change look hysterical or opportunistic. It also invites a moral conclusion from economic data: higher homeownership and lower crime imply social health, discipline, stability. That’s a culturally loaded pairing, especially in late-90s/early-2000s politics, when “crime” and “values” were code words as much as policy domains.

What makes it work is its selective completeness. The list feels comprehensive because it touches the big buckets of American self-evaluation, but it’s silent on distribution (who benefits), on costs (debt, inequality), and on causality (business cycle, policing strategies, incarceration, globalization). It’s a narrative of progress presented as proof, designed to end an argument before it starts.