Politics & Power Quote by Molly Ivins

Ivins lands the punchline first, then lets the sting spread. The line is structured like a favor to the reader - "please pay attention" - but it’s really an indictment: you were warned, you didn’t listen, and now we’re all living in the aftermath. That mock-politeness is her signature move, a genteel wrapper around a sharpened knife.

The specific intent isn’t regional snobbery so much as pattern recognition. Ivins spent her career decoding Texas political culture: swagger marketed as leadership, intimacy with oil money sold as plainspokenness, a statehouse style where loyalty and backslapping outrank competence. When she says "someone from Texas", she’s invoking a pipeline, not a birthplace. The subtext is: you keep mistaking performative toughness for governing skill, and Texas is unusually good at exporting that performance to a national stage.

Context does a lot of the work here. Ivins was a liberal Texas columnist who loved the place enough to embarrass it in public, which gave her critiques bite and credibility. Post-Bush, the quip reads like a rueful I-told-you-so; preemptively, it’s a warning about the media’s recurring weakness for the folksy candidate with the clean soundbites and messy policy. The humor isn’t just garnish. It’s a delivery system for civic memory - a way of saying that forgetting is not neutral; it’s how the same mistake gets re-elected.