Leadership Quote by David R. Gergen

Hubris is the appetizer; scandal is the hangover. David R. Gergen’s line lands because it treats political failure as a predictable sequence, not a shocking exception. The clipped rhythm, almost liturgical in its repetition of “we’re seeing,” turns spectatorship into indictment: the public isn’t discovering isolated misconduct, it’s watching the second act of a story everyone should recognize.

Gergen is not a firebrand outsider. He’s a consummate Washington insider and interpreter, someone who’s served and advised across administrations. That positioning matters. The sentence is calibrated for television and Beltway ears: sober, compressed, easy to quote, and hard to argue with. “Hubris” carries a classical charge, implying leaders intoxicated by power and insulated from consequence. “Scandals” drags that lofty arrogance down into the messy, document-heavy world of investigations, leaks, ethics probes, and reputational rot. The pairing suggests causality without litigating specifics: arrogance doesn’t just coexist with scandal, it produces it.

The subtext is a warning about governance as culture. When leaders reward loyalty over competence, treat rules as for other people, and confuse winning with legitimacy, the system starts generating scandals the way a stressed engine starts throwing sparks. Gergen’s “we” is doing double duty: it’s a communal “we” (citizens watching) and a Washington “we” (the professional class that recognizes the pattern). The line doesn’t ask you to pick a side; it asks you to notice the trajectory - and to stop pretending the crash came out of nowhere.