Politics & Power Quote by Ted Rall

Ted Rall’s line lands because it stages a polite Hollywood moment and then quietly detonates it. A powerful senator “sought me out because he was a fan” is the kind of flattery story that usually ends in self-congratulation or soft-focus civics: look, the system notices the artist. Rall refuses the expected payoff. His punchline - “I was thinking he had confused me with someone else” - isn’t just self-deprecation; it’s a way of reasserting the cartoonist’s natural habitat: skepticism, not access.

The context matters. Orrin Hatch wasn’t just any attendee; he was the keynote at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, a room built on drawing blood with ink. Having a politician headline that space carries a faint whiff of co-optation: the establishment strolling into the satirists’ den and expecting a handshake. Rall’s quip yanks the temperature back down. If Hatch is a “fan,” the implication is unsettling: fans usually enjoy the work. But editorial cartoons are supposed to irritate the people with levers of power. So Rall’s “confused me with someone else” reads as an insult in disguise - either Hatch doesn’t actually know Rall’s edge, or he likes it because it isn’t cutting him.

There’s also a professional flex hidden inside the humility. Rall positions himself as someone a senator would plausibly recognize, then performs distrust of that recognition. It’s the cartoonist’s credo in miniature: praise from power is never neutral, and the safest response is to treat it like a clerical error.