Politics & Power Quote by Joe Lieberman

Lieberman wraps an industrial policy argument in the most politically armored language available: troop support. “Very best money can buy” is a blank check phrased as a moral duty, the kind of line that turns budget debate into loyalty test. Once you accept the premise that “best” is nonnegotiable and measurable only by spending, every objection starts to sound like abandonment.

The second sentence reveals the real target: supply chains, procurement, and who captures the spoils of national security spending. “Developed in America” and “manufacturing base remains healthy and strong” reads like a bipartisan pressure point, fusing post-9/11 security anxieties with bread-and-butter job politics. It’s a deliberate triangulation: reassure hawks with “critical military technologies,” soothe labor and local economies with “manufacturing base,” and preempt globalization’s downsides without naming them. The subtext is economic nationalism framed as strategic necessity, a way to justify protecting defense contractors and domestic production even when offshoring might be cheaper.

Context matters: Lieberman’s era saw the War on Terror, repeated modernization pushes, and a defense industry that had consolidated into a handful of giants. That consolidation makes “healthy and strong” sound like a market ideal while quietly endorsing continued federal patronage. The language avoids words like “contracts,” “lobbying,” or “subsidy,” but that’s the mechanism beneath the rhetoric. It’s the classic Washington move: translate industrial means (funding, regulation, protection) into ethical ends (safety, readiness), and dare the listener to argue against the people in uniform.