Leadership Quote by Scott McCallum

It is the politician's version of a closed door: decisive, final, and deliberately hard to pry open. McCallum frames leadership as a muscle you build by refusing to wince. The repetition of "decisions" is doing a lot of work here, turning whatever the actual policies were into a character claim: I acted. In a culture that punishes hesitation more reliably than it punishes harm, action becomes its own alibi.

The key phrase is "we shouldn't feel bad at all". That "we" is elastic. It invites allies, staff, donors, and voters who backed him to step into a shared moral shelter. If there were consequences, the sentence implies, they belong to the world, not to the decision-makers. "Don't look back with any regrets" isn't just self-help rhetoric; it's preemptive damage control. Regret is treated as a luxury, a sign of weakness, even a kind of betrayal of the office.

As governor, McCallum is speaking from a job defined by tradeoffs that hurt someone: budgets, vetoes, cuts, appointments. By labeling them "tough decisions", he claims the credibility of burden without naming the burden's recipients. It's a familiar political move: translate concrete outcomes into abstract virtue, then insist that moral accounting is the same thing as indecision.

The subtext reads like a defensive posture after controversy: if you challenge the results, you are really challenging the legitimacy of firmness itself. The quote asks the audience to admire resolve and stop asking what, exactly, resolve was used for.