Leadership Quote by Sam Brownback

Bipartisanship is doing a lot of work here - less as a factual claim than as a rhetorical shield. Brownback’s opening line doesn’t just invite agreement; it tries to preempt dissent by recasting opposition as petty partisanship. “This is just good common sense” is the next layer of insulation: a phrase that frames policy as self-evident, positioning critics not merely as wrong but as unreasonable, maybe even unserious.

The appeal to “where the public wants us to go” is strategic ventriloquism. Politicians love to borrow the electorate’s voice because it turns a contested agenda into a mandate. It’s also a subtle dodge: if the policy later disappoints, responsibility can be diffused back into the hazy idea of “public will.” In a media environment where energy policy is dense and slow-moving, “the public” becomes a convenient character in the story, not an empirically checkable constituency.

The line about “not be so dependent on foreign oil” taps an enduring American pressure point: energy as national security, masculinity, and autonomy rolled into one. It’s less about gasoline prices than the psychic discomfort of reliance. Brownback’s context - mid-2000s-era anxieties over Middle East instability, price spikes, and post-9/11 geopolitics - made “energy independence” a bipartisan slogan even when the underlying solutions (drilling, ethanol mandates, renewables, efficiency) were anything but.

What makes the quote work is its sequencing: consensus (bipartisan), inevitability (common sense), legitimacy (the public), then fear and pride (foreign dependence). It’s a verbal on-ramp designed to get listeners moving before they’ve asked where, exactly, they’re being driven.