Politics & Power Quote by Meg Greenfield

Politics, in Greenfield's telling, is less a battle of ideas than a bookkeeping exercise in guilt. "Deciding whom to blame" isn’t just a cynical aside; it’s a diagnosis of how power survives contact with reality. Because governing produces losers as reliably as it produces laws, the main work becomes narrative triage: contain fallout, assign fault, protect allies, and keep the coalition from splintering under the weight of unmet promises.

The line works because it reframes politics as a competition over causality. Who caused the problem? Who benefited? Who failed to act? Those answers are rarely neutral; they are chosen, packaged, and repeated until they harden into common sense. Blame is the currency that buys permission to govern again. If you can pin inflation on a predecessor, crime on permissive judges, gridlock on extremists, you don’t have to defend every outcome-you just have to win the explanation.

Greenfield, an editor steeped in Washington’s rhythms, is also quietly implicating the press ecosystem that helps adjudicate blame. Editors and reporters don’t merely document events; they help set the default storyline: incompetence vs. betrayal, accident vs. design, system vs. villain. That’s the subtext: accountability is necessary, but blame is often a substitute for responsibility. The most revealing part is the verb "deciding". It suggests culpability is not discovered like a fact; it’s negotiated like a budget.

Read in the late-20th-century context of perpetual campaigning and scandal politics, the quote feels less bitter than utilitarian. It’s a reminder that policy arguments are often downstream from a simpler fight: who gets to walk away clean.