Leadership Quote by Harold Ford

Bipartisanship here isn’t a warm-and-fuzzy civic virtue; it’s a shield and a sales pitch. Ford’s sentence is built to do two things at once: announce safety (“broad bipartisan support”) and smuggle in an ideological project (“ownership society”) under the banner of pragmatic dealmaking. The first clause reassures skittish voters and donors that this bill won’t trigger partisan backlash. It also quietly pressures holdouts: if both sides are already on board, resistance starts to look unserious, even selfish.

“Build on some of the things that have been talked about in Washington” is classic political soft focus. It avoids naming the controversial parts of the agenda while signaling fluency with insider consensus. The phrase “talked about” matters: it implies momentum without committing to specifics that could be attacked later. It’s a rhetorical down payment, not a contract.

Then comes the real payload: “a larger ownership society.” In the mid-2000s, that language was heavily associated with a Republican-inflected vision of citizenship built through private assets - homeownership, personal investment accounts, individualized responsibility. Ford, a Democrat often positioned as a centrist, is cueing cross-aisle alignment while reframing market-based policy as aspirational and inclusive. “Larger” is doing political work, too, hinting at expansion and uplift rather than deregulation or risk transfer.

The subtext: this bill isn’t just legislation; it’s brand management. Ford is positioning himself as the kind of politician who can translate Washington’s buzzwords into a feel-good promise of stakeholding, while keeping enough ambiguity to survive the next news cycle.