Politics & Power Quote by Warren Rudman

Rudman is doing that very Washington thing: sounding like a technocrat while actually drawing a moral map. He’s talking about risk and funding formulas, but the real target is the lazy politics of arithmetic. “Per capita” reads as fairness until you say it out loud in a country where danger, infrastructure strain, and symbolic value are wildly uneven. Washington, D.C. isn’t just another city; it’s the nation’s stage set and target, a place whose vulnerabilities are inseparable from its role. By contrasting it with Manchester, New Hampshire, Rudman yanks the listener out of hometown equivalence and into hierarchy: some places carry national burdens that a headcount can’t capture.

The subtext is a warning about the seductive comfort of neutral metrics. Budgeting “per capita” lets lawmakers pretend they’re being objective, when they’re really sidestepping the uncomfortable job of prioritizing. Rudman’s phrasing also carries a quiet New England credibility: he’s not dismissing Manchester (“They both need some level of funding”), he’s insisting that seriousness means discrimination, not equal slices.

Then comes the political knife: “Congress is to blame for some of this.” That line redirects any resentment away from bureaucrats or local leaders and toward the institution that loves formulas because formulas diffuse accountability. He’s implying a familiar Capitol Hill pathology: legislators underfund obvious needs, then hide behind procedural fairness. In a post-1970s, post-terror-scare America where federal responsibilities ballooned but political courage didn’t, Rudman’s point lands as both policy critique and indictment of congressional evasiveness.