Leadership Quote by Donna Brazile

Brazile’s line is a scalpel disguised as a statistic. By anchoring the claim to “since Bush has been in office,” she turns a trend into an indictment: not just that inequality persists, but that it has worsened on a specific administration’s watch. The choice of “African-American women” is strategic coalition politics with teeth. It spotlights an electorate Democrats often claim as a moral center of the party, while also invoking the double bind of race and gender without needing to say “intersectionality.” The sentence is built to force a question that sounds empirical but lands as ethical: if the economy is supposedly strong, who is it strong for?

The subtext is that macroeconomic victory laps are usually measured in averages that launder disparity. “Income and wages” functions like a one-two punch: wages speak to labor markets and policy levers (minimum wage, union power, enforcement), while income hints at the broader ecosystem (wealth gaps, benefits, household stability). She’s not only arguing about paychecks; she’s arguing about whose work is valued and protected.

Context matters: Brazile is a party operator, not a poet. The intent isn’t lyrical persuasion; it’s message discipline. In the early 2000s, as the Bush White House sold tax cuts and ownership-society optimism, this kind of line weaponized distributional data to puncture the feel-good story. It frames economic policy as a civil-rights issue with a timestamp, daring the audience to treat “behind” as a policy choice, not a natural outcome.