Leadership Quote by Stephanie Herseth

Populism with a policy suit on: the villain is already cast, the victims already named. Herseth’s line is built to make “record profits” feel like a confession rather than a financial metric. “Multinational” does extra work too, signaling distance, disloyalty, and scale - corporations so large they’ve slipped the social contract. By the time she gets to “gouge,” the argument isn’t about market volatility or refining capacity; it’s about morality. The verb implies intent, not circumstance, and it places consumers in the familiar posture of being trapped at the pump.

The specific intent is pressure politics. She’s not merely describing high gas prices; she’s narrowing the acceptable explanations and raising the political cost of inaction. The move is classic: translate complex supply chains into a simple narrative of exploitation, then position government as the only actor capable of rebalancing power. “We can’t allow” frames regulation as baseline responsibility, not ideological choice.

The subtext is equally strategic. “We must do what we can” sounds pragmatic, but it’s a permission slip for intervention without committing to one controversial tool. Windfall profit taxes? Anti-price-gouging enforcement? More drilling, more refinery capacity, more releases from strategic reserves? The language keeps the coalition wide: angry drivers, nervous moderates, and even skeptics of big oil can all hear their preferred remedy in the phrase.

Contextually, it fits the recurring American gas-price cycle where politicians borrow the rhetoric of emergency to look responsive, even when the levers are slow or limited. The quote works because it offers a clean emotional map: someone is to blame, and government can - at minimum - be seen fighting back.