A June 7 Style story on Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) misstated the planting and harvest seasons for wheat in Kansas. According to the Kansas Department of Agriculture, the predominant wheat crop in the state is generally planted in September and harvested in June.
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Faith-Based Initiative
Brownback says his model for the presidential race would be the way he ran for Senate in 1996, after discovering the melanoma.
"If I win, I win. If I lose, I lose," he says. "It's a great liberation. . . . And then you run on the topics that you really feel called to do. And the beauty of it is, is that people really like that. They may not agree with you on things but they really do like that. The purpose-driven life."
  Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: "Instead of getting angry at somebody for opposing you on something . . . you just pray blessings on them, blessings on their family." (Bill O'Leary -- The Washington Post) |
He talks about the presidency with a sense -- as his former chief of staff David Kensinger put it -- that "what is supposed to happen will happen." He believes America is a special place destined for special things, and that it is undergoing a "renewal of the soul."
"If Sam's headed for higher office it's because he thinks the mission is headed for higher office," says Barron, the conservationist.
But how can a person be humble and also believe he should be president of the most powerful country in the world?
"It's one of the most humbling things on Earth," Brownback says, his voice soft. "Look at the nature and the difficulty of that job and the greatness of this country and the need to be humble and wise to serve. Plus it's just, it's like, pride was the first sin and humility's the first grace . . ."
"I think Reagan had it right that you don't pursue the presidency, it pursues you."
But a man who expects a crop must first till the soil. Brownback knows this. He still goes home to his childhood farm for the spring planting and the fall harvest of the wheat.
He used to keep a tennis ball can filled with Kansas dirt in his office as a symbol "of what I physically return to," he says. "It's just a great reminder that you serve for a period, you serve for a season and then you move on."
Brownback says he imagines future generations walking the halls of Congress and nobody knowing who he was. He imagines people passing a "Brownback Room" and someone saying, "Who was he?"
Perhaps someone else might answer that Sam Brownback was a complicated man, who thought himself a servant and a potential president at the same time, who imagined his life forgotten even as he dreamed of a room named after himself.
