Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today to pay tribute to my longtime chief of staff Ryan Nelson, who has decided to step down in the new year. It is difficult to know where to start to pay tribute to a man who has been indispensable to everything I have ever done in Congress; so perhaps I should start at the beginning, back in 1996, during the Republican primary for South Dakota's lone House seat. I was a green candidate running on a shoestring budget, and one morning, a campaign volunteer showed up at my door and announced that he was my driver. His name was Ryan Nelson. That day, we headed to an event in Arlington, SD. Unbeknownst to me, my new driver proceeded to lock his keys in the car. This might have caused some campaign volunteers to panic, but not Ryan. He made his way over to a filling station, found someone who could get into the car and retrieve the keys, all without my knowing that anything had ever happened. That resourcefulness turned out to be a pretty good indicator of what was to come--not the ``locking the keys in car'' part but the seeing a problem and solving it before I even had a chance to become aware of it. Ryan kept driving me around the State, and we ended up winning the primary. Ryan came to a crossroads, both metaphorical and literal. You see, Ryan was originally just filling time on the campaign. He was scheduled to leave for the Kansas City police academy the day after the primary.…”