Politics & Power Quote by Pete Domenici

“Small business” is doing a lot of rhetorical heavy lifting here: it’s less an economic category than a moral character in America’s political folklore. Domenici’s line doesn’t just report growth; it confers virtue. By calling small business “the job creator,” he compresses a messy labor market into a single heroic agent, the mom-and-pop entrepreneur who supposedly keeps the national engine running. That framing quietly sidelines other job-producing forces - large firms, public spending, unions, consumer demand - and replaces them with a more politically useful protagonist.

The repetition is the tell. “In America” lands twice like a stamp on a passport, signaling patriotism as much as policy. “Absolutely” isn’t evidence; it’s a preemptive rebuttal. The message is designed to travel well in a soundbite economy: upbeat, definitive, and difficult to argue with without sounding anti-small-business, which in U.S. politics is a near-impossible posture.

Context matters: Domenici was a long-serving Republican senator and a key budget voice in an era when tax cuts, deregulation, and pro-business messaging were central party grammar. Declaring a boom primes the audience to accept the next step: keep rates low, keep rules light, keep government from “getting in the way.” The subtext is reassurance with an agenda - the economy is fine (or fixable) if we protect the people who “create jobs,” and by implication, if we stop worrying about everyone else.