Leadership Quote by Norm Dicks

Norm Dicks isn’t trying to sound poetic here; he’s trying to sound competent. The power of the line is its plainspoken choreography of stakeholders: state officials, preservationists, the tribe, the local community, the port. It reads like a roll call, and that’s the point. By stacking constituencies, Dicks signals that the outcome was legitimate not because it was morally self-evident, but because it survived a gauntlet of interests. This is the language of a dealmaker performing transparency.

The repeated “with” does quiet rhetorical work. It frames the tribe not as an obstacle to development or a symbolic add-on, but as a necessary partner in governance. In a region like the Olympic Peninsula, where land use fights often pit economic infrastructure against heritage and sovereignty, naming the “historic preservation people” alongside “the port” telegraphs the real tension: progress narratives versus protection narratives. Dicks positions himself as the hinge that kept those stories from becoming mutually exclusive.

The subtext is also defensive. “What I did” is a claim of authorship, a way to preempt criticism from any side that might argue the compromise sold them out. “We worked this thing out” sandpapers away conflict; it implies reasonableness and good faith while skipping the messy parts (who conceded what, and under what pressure). Ending on “we protected the tribe’s interest” is both a moral badge and a political one: it casts the final deal as not merely balanced, but anchored by a commitment to tribal rights, without admitting how fragile or partial that protection may have been.