Leadership Quote by John Hickenlooper

It takes a particular kind of political math to look at a city underwater and land on “not all that bad.” Hickenlooper’s line is doing what officials often do in the wake of catastrophe: translating human suffering into a performance metric, then grading the response on a curve. The phrasing is revealing. “There could have been more planning” is a soft, managerial admission, the kind that implies a missed meeting rather than a broken system. Then comes the pivot: a death toll framed as a scoreboard - “have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet?” - as if the true failure would be crossing some symbolic threshold instead of the preventable deaths, displacement, and institutional collapse already in view.

The subtext is defensive. He’s not really talking about New Orleans so much as inoculating government against a harsher verdict. By invoking “that magnitude,” he invites the audience to imagine an even worse apocalypse and feel relieved it didn’t happen, a classic rhetorical move that lowers expectations until survival itself becomes a policy success.

Context matters: post-Katrina discourse was a pressure cooker of televised misery, federal-state blame-shifting, and racialized neglect laid bare. Against that backdrop, minimizing reads less like pragmatism and more like a window into how power preserves itself: empathize briefly, quantify quickly, declare the result acceptable. The line’s chill comes from its inadvertent honesty about what politics can treat as tolerable.