Leadership Quote by Joshua Micah Marshall

“Some of the immediate causes…” is doing sly work before it even gets to Abramoff. The phrasing sounds like a dry, bureaucratic memo, but that’s the point: Joshua Micah Marshall frames scandal the way Washington prefers to discuss scandal - as a chain of “causes,” not a set of choices. The bloodless tone becomes its own indictment, implying a system where corruption is treated like weather.

Then comes the kicker: “some Indian elections that went bad for him.” The line compresses an ugly reality into a neat bit of irony. Native American tribal elections, in Abramoff’s orbit, weren’t civic rituals so much as levers in a high-stakes lobbying machine. Marshall’s subtext is that Abramoff didn’t stumble because the moral universe finally caught up with him; he stumbled because the local power dynamics shifted. In other words, accountability enters the story through contingency, not conscience.

The quote also flips the normal perspective. We’re used to thinking of elections as events that shape public life. Here, elections register primarily as private risk: they “went bad for him.” That pronoun is the tell. It spotlights the way powerful operators recast other people’s democratic processes as variables in their own profit-and-influence calculations.

Context matters: Abramoff’s downfall was fueled by investigations into lobbying abuses tied to tribal clients and casinos, where internal tribal politics and leadership changes could disrupt the money pipeline. Marshall’s intent is to show how precarious corruption is - not because it’s fragile morally, but because it depends on keeping multiple communities, incentives, and narratives tightly managed.