Leadership Quote by Sue Kelly

Progress, in Sue Kelly's framing, is both a boast and a preemptive apology. The line is built to let a politician stand in two places at once: claim credit for "increasing funding" while conceding that the job isn't done. It's the safest kind of moral ambition, because it flatters the listener's values (support the troops) without naming the painful part (what exactly is underfunded, who blocked it, and what price tag "fully meeting the promise" actually carries).

The phrase "the promise to our veterans" does heavy rhetorical lifting. It treats veterans' care as a national contract rather than a policy preference, shifting the debate from partisan accounting to civic obligation. That move is intentional: it makes opposition to expanded benefits sound less like fiscal restraint and more like breach of faith. At the same time, the passive, collective "we" spreads responsibility so thin that no one actor is accountable. It invites consensus while quietly dodging blame.

Context matters here. Kelly, a Republican congresswoman from New York, operated in an era when post-Cold War downsizing, then the long shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan, collided with rising awareness of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and backlogged VA claims. "Great progress" speaks to incremental appropriations politics; "a long way to go" gestures at the structural truth voters sense anyway: war costs don't end when troops come home. The intent is to signal seriousness without committing to a specific, potentially controversial next step.