Having bragged on my grandmother yesterday, I’m going to add a bit about my grandfather. I think his eulogy was one all politicians should aspire to.
Grampa died at 95. The man who had been his chief of staff back in the day spoke at the funeral, and one of the things he said was this:
As a young man working for Grampa, he’d been approached by the frustrated staffer of another congressman, who told him, “You don’t know how lucky you are.” The guy said that when a vote came up on the floor, “You always know how your guy is going to vote. He always votes his conscience.”
The man he worked for, on the other hand, he said, would hide back in the coat closet to watch how the vote was going and then add his voice in only when he knew which side was going to be the winning one.
That congressman never got that Grampa’s way of living his life triumphed over any momentary appearance of success.