Leadership Quote by Scott McCallum

It’s the kind of “above politics” line politicians reach for when the room is hot and the scoreboard is ugly. McCallum’s phrasing tries to drain the oxygen out of partisan ownership: don’t ask who’s in charge, ask whether government functions. On its face, it’s managerial, almost technocratic. The subtext is more tactical: if voters are primed to blame an “administration,” shifting the frame to “the state of Wisconsin” converts a referendum on leadership into a conversation about systems, process, and shared outcomes.

The repetition does the work. “Important aspect” appears twice like a metronome, not for elegance but for discipline: it signals that the speaker is reordering priorities and asking the audience to follow. “Whose administration it is” sounds like a scolding toward media narratives and party-scorekeeping, while “how does the state of Wisconsin work” is an appeal to competence as a bipartisan virtue. It also quietly lowers expectations. If government is framed as a machine you keep running, political conflict becomes background noise rather than a moral drama.

Context matters because this rhetoric usually surfaces in moments of transition, scrutiny, or divided government. A Wisconsin governor - or anyone near the executive branch - benefits from recasting governance as a collective project: “we” can “move Wisconsin forward.” That “we” is inclusive on purpose, blurring lines between party actors, legislators, and citizens, and making criticism feel like obstruction. It’s not naïve unity; it’s a strategic bid to own the adult table.