From The New Yorker:
REMNICK: You’re talking about your earliest days in the Senate, and you go to see Robert Byrd. And Robert Byrd gives you the time of day, and he wants to give you his best advice—he’s been in the Senate for approximately two hundred and forty years. And he says the following: “We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known and the bills he had managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.” Are you going to follow his advice?
OBAMA: You just got the award for the most creative lead-in on a question I’ve been getting. First of all, visiting with Robert Byrd is a ritual that every senator has to go through. And it’s an amazing scene, going into his office and seeing all the history on display. And I think that what he’s absolutely right about is that we tend to think about politics in terms of individual ambition, and most of us who get there—I write in the book that, no matter what people say, there’s some level of megalomania involved in getting to the United States Senate.
More here.
