Leadership Quote by Dick Murphy

Power, Murphy is arguing, is less about rank than reach. The line is a quiet rebuke to the prestige economy of politics: the idea that climbing “up” to the statehouse automatically means doing more good. He flips the hierarchy. Mayor isn’t a stepping-stone; it’s the cockpit.

The intent is practical and recruiting at once. Murphy is selling local office as the place where decisions touch skin: whether trash gets picked up, whether permits stall housing, whether police leadership calms or inflames, whether a budget potholes a neighborhood or repairs it. State legislators vote on broad frameworks and funding streams, but they’re often insulated by scale, procedure, and partisanship. A mayor can’t hide behind a caucus. When the water main breaks or the homeless shelter overflows, it’s your phone that rings.

The subtext carries a warning about modern politics’ performative drift. State-level work can reward messaging, party loyalty, and symbolic fights that travel well on TV. City leadership rewards competence in the unglamorous: staffing, procurement, labor negotiations, land use, crisis response. Murphy’s phrasing - “controlling,” “affecting local lives” - is blunt on purpose, almost managerial. It suggests politics as governance, not theater.

Context matters: mayors sit at the intersection of policy and daily life, but also at the pressure point of public anger. To call it “so much more important” is to underline both the potential and the liability. Local office offers the fastest route to changing people’s lived experience, and the shortest fuse when you fail.