The following letter appeared in the Letters section of the Financial Times today (April 5)1:
“Janan Ganesh concludes his column on the difficulties of getting Europe to spend more on defence (Opinion, March 27) with a quote attributed to what he calls ‘another European leader, in another era, in another context’. I believe he was referring to Jean-Claude Juncker, the then prime minister of Luxembourg, who quipped: ‘We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’
Which reminds me of what Paul Ryan, then head of the House of Representatives budget committee, said of his efforts to reform entitlement spending in the US: ‘The way I look at things is if you want to be good at this kind of job, you have to be willing to lose it.’
Even though Democrats accused him of wanting to push grandma’s wheelchair off the cliff, representative Ryan continued to work for entitlement reform because he knew it was needed (and, since he unfortunately couldn’t get the Senate or president to agree, still is).”
The key to being a leader, as opposed to a mere politician, is knowing when you can do what you have to in order to get re-elected and when you must do what is right, regardless of whether you get re-elected.
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1 Unfortunately, the letter is behind the FT’s paywall.
UPDATE (4/5/24 9:50 am): Corrected the reference to Jean-Claude Juncker.
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