Politics & Power Quote by Laura Bush

The sentence moves like a slow, careful procession, and that is the point. Laura Bush isn’t trying to win an argument; she’s trying to share the moral weight of decisions that, in reality, sat heavily on one office. By opening with “we’ve faced” and “every one of us have,” she performs a subtle redistribution of responsibility, folding the public into the posture of wartime governance. It’s a linguistic draft notice: emotional participation as civic duty.

The most telling maneuver is the slide from “our country” to “we” to “the President.” She starts with collective hardship, then narrows to presidential authority, then expands again through “young men and women” - a phrase that personalizes soldiers without naming policy specifics. That personalization functions as moral insulation. The listener is invited to feel the sacrifice first, and only then to consider the choices that produced it.

Context does the heavy lifting: post-9/11 America, when “the war on terror” became both a policy framework and a cultural permission slip for indefinite action. As First Lady, Bush’s role is affect and legitimacy, not strategy. The line reflects that division of labor: she speaks in empathy, not evidence; in national trauma, not operational detail. “Had to make” is the quietest, sharpest clause - it renders controversial decisions as unavoidable, even virtuous, and turns dissent into a failure of shared burden rather than a debate over aims, intelligence, or cost.