Politics & Power Quote by Gary Miller

A politician’s best trick is to make a complicated market feel like a kitchen-table receipt, and Gary Miller does it by turning gasoline into a moral ledger. “55 percent” frames pain at the pump as basically inevitable: most of what you pay is crude, and crude is “global supply and demand,” a phrase that politely absolves domestic actors. It’s a rhetorical move that says: don’t blame me, blame the planet.

Then he pivots to the real payload: dependency. “62 percent” is engineered to sound like vulnerability, even before he uses the word. “Foreign sources” is deliberately unspecific, letting listeners fill in the blank with whatever geopolitical anxiety is most vivid in that moment - the Middle East, unfriendly regimes, shipping lanes, war. It’s less an energy statistic than a prompt for national unease.

The projection to “75 percent by 2010” adds a deadline, which is how policy arguments get oxygen. Forecasts are never neutral in politics; they create urgency without having to prove causality. Miller isn’t just describing trends, he’s building a case for intervention: drill more at home, diversify energy, open new leases, expand strategic reserves, or justify tougher foreign policy. The subtext is that the free market sets the price, but the nation must reclaim control over the supply.

Context matters: this kind of language thrives when gas prices are salient and post-9/11 security thinking bleeds into energy talk. The numbers are the hook; the emotion is sovereignty.