The topic of this episode is, “How can a new staffer survive Congress?”
My guest is Mark Strand, the coauthor of the book, “Surviving Inside Congress.” Mark is the President of the Congressional Institute, a not-for-profit organization that helps Members of Congress better serve their constituents and that helps constituents better understand Congress. Mark has led the institute since 2007, and prior to that spent nearly 20 years working as a staffer for members and committees in the House of Representatives.
Kevin Kosar:
Mark, welcome to the program.
Mark Strand:
Thanks Kevin. It’s good to be here.
Kevin Kosar:
Let me ask my first question, which is how does somebody get a job working for Congress? What are the pathways in?
Mark Strand:
It’s interesting, there are really several pathways in and none of them are necessarily traditional. It’s very rare you hear of anyone getting a job on the Hill by looking at the classifieds. The two best ways I think are to volunteer on a campaign. And then if the guy wins, you’re at least… You’re a known [inaudible 00:01:44] opportunity to maybe get in on the ground floor or the second is to intern. And if you do an internship, you can definitely be successful. The way I tell people who are interning to think about it is that it’s like a two month job interview. If you go, and you just want to fool around and go to the receptions, all right, there’s that kind of intern. If you had the kind of intern that they hired, because daddy was a big fundraiser and that he wanted his son to work on the Hill, yeah that’ll come through true.
Mark Strand:
But the interns who are the most successful, the ones who really work hard, try to fill vacuums, ask the staff assistant, ask the LA’s if they can help with something, if they can do some research. And then what they’ll find out very quickly is that the more they do, the more they’re trusted, and the more they’re given, and the Hill is sort of the last of the great meritocracies. There’s no job protection, but at the same time that there’s no qualifications. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or a master’s degree, where you’re from, what race, ethnicity, anything. It doesn’t matter, because if you make the boss look good, they’re going to find a way to keep you and to give you more and more to do. So, the best thing to do is to get your foot in the door anyway, you can. Internships are usually the best or volunteers, but at the same time, once you get your foot in the door, just understand that they’re watching very closely to see if you’re the kind of person they’re going to want to keep on for a long time.
Kevin Kosar:
That’s true. The Hill, as you note in your book, is not for everyone. Now surviving inside Congress, one of the passages, and there are many that caught my eye was where you wrote that there’s little in someone’s college coursework that’s likely to well prepare them for a job on the Hill. That might be surprising to some of the listeners. They might think, well, I took political science and a course on government and that’ll make me ready. That’s not the case. Why is that? And is there anything a student listening to you today can do to prepare themselves for a job on the Hill?
Mark Strand:
Kevin, it’s interesting. Yeah. I was a double major undergraduate history, and political science and the history is far more valuable, because the history teaches you about what’s happened before and what’s likely to happen again in one form or another. So I think history is a great thing to have. I think, a good writer, one of the most important things for working on the Hill is to be a good writer, and a good communicator. So taking any courses in communication or writing, even English literature, something that helps you with the language can give you the opportunity, a real asset in a congressional staff. So I think my friends in political science, you and I are kind of in the same boat. We have friends that think that just because they can put a square root into a white paper somewhere that it’s called political science, but it’s not quite a science as much, unless maybe sociology is your science.
Mark Strand:
It’s more just the business of people. And if you understand people, and if you get along with people and you try to read people that this is going to be the most valuable thing you can do. In fact, sometimes in the business world, they talk about emotional intelligence as opposed to just the knowledge based intelligence and in politics, emotional based intelligence is very important. So if you’re in college and you get the opportunity to work with people on a regular basis to interact with people, this is what you want to be doing. You don’t want to just sit there reading a book, but I’ll tell you, it goes even further, not just for the new place, with like for instance, chiefs of staff. Here they are running a small business, in the Senate, you’re running maybe a fairly large business and almost no one gets a job because they’re good at management.
Mark Strand:
There are very few MBAs on Capitol Hill. They get the job because they’re good at legislation or they’re going to press or good at campaigns. And all of a sudden they’re put in charge of an office of 20 people or 40 people in the Senate, 18 people in the House and said, “Okay, manage these people and continue to do what you were doing well before.” So it’s tough about what the education you get beforehand, because sometimes you’re not really prepared for the challenges you get.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, it sounds like there’s a case for students who want to prepare for the Hill to well, for one, make sure that they can write well. Number two, invest some time in learning how to speak well. Number three, steeping themselves in some history about Congress and the basics of the structure and how the place was built, and forth, maybe finding some sort of course or class on interpersonal bargaining, because relationships and that sociological aspect of the Hill is just, I think, critical to succeeding as a staffer.
Mark Strand:
Yeah. There’s a reason that poly has a root word of politics, it means people. It’s a business about involving people. If you’re good with people, you can do it very well.
Kevin Kosar:
So, when a staffer, who’s lucky enough to get a foot in the door and land on Capitol Hill, what he or she first arrives, what can he or she do to avoid screwing up? Are there classic traps and pitfalls to avoid?
Mark Strand:
There are. And there, I sometimes think it’s like a gauntlet. The senior staff is trying to see which interns will trip up at, which won’t. The whole thing is if you get your foot in the door, it’s a serious place. It’s a serious business with a long institutional history. You need to treat it with respect. It also means you need to figure out how you can be most helpful, and then do it. One thing I tell people on the Hill is to fill vacuums. So whenever you get the opportunity to do something, take it on. Even if it’s an issue, that’s not particularly interesting to you, but if a LA asks you to write a letter on some issue, that it seems like a boring issue, do it and do it well. One you’re learning how to learn, which is the important thing about doing a letter.
Mark Strand:
But two, you never know when that issue is suddenly going to become big. I remember for years, the veterans’ issues were kind of more casework than anything else, but then we had a war and then we had people trying to get into the VA hospital system. And all of a sudden the scandal of how badly the VA hospitals were being run became a huge issue. So here’s an issue where maybe no one was paying much attention before suddenly became the most important issue in Congress. And as a result, the person handling that issue suddenly was front and center, talking to the boss, talking to the member of Congress on a regular basis about the latest in legislative developments and news and what the administration is doing. So you never know. I always thought the best way to work on the Hill is to fill back in. I came in as a junior to legislative assistant, and I just kept taking issues.
Mark Strand:
Within a year and a half, I was a legislative director at age 26. A few years later, I was the chief of staff for different member. You just keep grabbing what comes your way. And the good thing about it is there’s always vacuums. I mean, you have 10,000 bills introduced in every single session of Congress, each one of them, the most important thing in the world to somebody, although there are a lot more somebodies in some bills than others, but the more you learn, the more you become valuable, the more you are about your own niche and the more you create a desire in your office to keep you moving up and keep going on because you make them all look good. The other thing I would say also is to get to network with a lot of people. Besides becoming a student of Congress, and I really do think that’s important. To become a student of Congress where you study the institution, read the books.
Mark Strand:
I mean, the Robert Rimini’s, The House or Caro’s book Master of the Senate, get a flavor for what goes on because you can almost tell the, for instance, a history of the House goes according to the power of the rules committee, and it’s cyclical. It goes up and down, which means that what is today, won’t be tomorrow. And what was yesterday, may be again next year. So the more you treat the institution with respect and just work hard at every opportunity you get the further you’ll go, but it’s not for everybody. Not everyone wants to work that hard, but if want to be successful, you should.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. One of the things that your book emphasizes is that for a new staffer or even a long-term staffer to be successful, he or she’s got to know his place. In short, you’re not the star of the show as the staffer. Somebody else is, and that would be the elected official. And that’s a demand for people who want attention, who want recognition for getting things done, needs to be suppressed, because if you want to go around claiming credit for getting things done, that doesn’t work with the ethos of the place, does it?
Mark Strand:
No, it’s a very vicarious existence in some ways, because your best work is, of course, for the boss, his name is on the door. The people elected, the Congressman or Congresswoman they’re the agenda that the people voted for it and your job is to help the members successfully accomplish that agenda. And so, as a result you don’t go, you shouldn’t go bragging about things you have done as if you were the member, because you can’t do that. But at the same time, it also means that you get doors opened to you that wouldn’t be otherwise open so you can accomplish things. The nice thing is when you work for a member of Congress. And you call a think tank like AEI and say, “My boss, he’s a member of Congress that he’s working on this issue, do you have any policy experts who can come brief him?”
Mark Strand:
And the American Enterprise Institute says, “Absolutely! we will send our scholars down any chance we get.” And so all of a sudden if you were in college, and made that phone call, you might get patted on the head, but you’re in Congress, you call that, all of a sudden, there are top experts in the field rushing down to the Hill to talk to your boss at your say so. So it’s a kind of a trade-off. You do have to suppress your own personality, which is hard for people in politics, there are a lot of type A’s and a lot of extroverts, but at the same time, you have an opportunity to get things done that there’s no place, other place in the world you’d be able to get that much accomplished. I have a story about a young staffer who was very accomplished. She volunteered when Talent got elected to the Senate in 2002. She was a student at George Washington, studied Latin American affairs, and she said, “Can I answer the phone for you?” That’d be great. She did.
Mark Strand:
And she was so good, we hired her as a staff assistant and as a staff assistant, she would do all of her jobs, and then she’d ask the legislative assistant if she could help with some letters. And she started working on some issues, then she worked on the issues, and all of a sudden we had an opening and she became a legislative correspondent. So, she moved up quickly just within a few months. Finally, a big issue came along. Now we were a big goals oriented office. We have a lot of plans, but also the boss had a new issue he wanted to use. And so he said, “Who can handle this issue?” Everyone else was filled with this. And she volunteered. She said, “Well, if you guys help me do it, I will be happy to handle the issue.” And so she started taking over. It was a bill on methamphetamines because the Missouri, where Talent was from, they had the biggest cause of rural fires was meth labs blowing up. And they needed to do something about it.
Mark Strand:
And so we taught her how to write a dear colleague letter and how to go to the legislative council and get a bill drafted, and she did fine. And she would call up someone at the judiciary committee and the senior staff and that would say, “Beat it, kid.” And then she’d go to Talent. Talent would go talk to Arlen Specter, who was the Republicans judiciary chairman at the time, all of a sudden that same staffer would call
[inaudible 00:12:38]
“I’m sorry, I must’ve misunderstood what you were saying. Please, how can I help you?” And things have moved along. And all of a sudden the bill got attached, Mitch McConnell got it attached to the Patriot Act because in the Senate you can do things like that. And Roy Blunt, who was the Whip in the house of the time, got it attached to the house bill and it passed, and became law.
Mark Strand:
The reason why you have to sign a log today to get pseudoephedrine, and the reason why there are very few domestic meth labs anymore is because of this work with this one 22 year old person who volunteered one day for a Senate office and just kept taking on more and more responsibilities. Now, where else in the world can you have that kind of impact in your early twenties, then you can on Capitol Hill. So the key is to just keep doing those vacuums and doing them, and you never know what’s going to fall in your lap. And you could actually, the serious thing about it and why you want to be a student of it is that you do have a chance to change history. There’s very few places in the world you can say that today, but on the Hill, you can.
Kevin Kosar:
That’s amazing. That’s a great story. That’s a great, great story. And it’s one where you probably not going to find a newspaper naming this individual and giving her credit for this achievement, but you know and she knows, and the people who are on the Hill now.
Mark Strand:
And that was a good thing, because I should say she went on to become a US trade representative for the European Union. So obviously other people saw her work and she moved up rapidly and kept moving even in a career that went outside of Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
I want to move on, you’ve given us some hints to it, but could you say, what is the work culture inside the House of Representatives? It’s clearly not a nine to five corporate cubicle job. How would you characterize it?
Mark Strand:
Boy, it’s like, you got to be all in. And it’s a hard job in the sense that the hours are you put in what’s needed. It’s not a nine to five job. You’re not civil service. I mean, so it’s not like you have any job protections either, but when there’s a budget on the floor and they’re going to vote all through the night, like they do in the Senate, when there’s something that they call vote-a-rama, you’re going to be there all night and you have to be following the bill every step of the way, so your boss doesn’t cast a wrong vote on an issue. Sometimes when the Congress is in session, things are more relaxed, but you just have to understand that when you work on the Hill, that you’re professional and you do what the job requires.
Mark Strand:
And sometimes that’s 50 hour weeks, or 60 hour weeks. And sometimes it’s not so bad, but when Congress is in session, you work hard. The other thing I find, too, is that if you’re OCD or something, you have compulsive personality, you can only do one thing at a time. This is a very rough place to work because you can be sitting at your desk and typing a memo and you get a phone call and someone calls you, it’s constituent asking a question. And just then, the boss comes out and says, “What’s this one on the floor. How am I supposed to vote?” And you got to talk to your boss, give him the answer that you got, and then pick up the phone and finish that call and then sit down and go back to writing. It’s a multitasking job. And they always warn you about not multitasking because maybe you don’t do anything right.
Mark Strand:
Well, you multitask and you have to do everything, right. This is why to a large degree, it’s a young person’s job because people get burned out over time. And it’s hard. It’s hard to do that, but you have to do that. But the key is, if you can do that, you can do any job anywhere. One of the things you see, I think quite it’s unfortunate, too many people go downtown too quickly is that they see all these hardworking people and how fast they acquired knowledge and can continue to acquire knowledge, and they try to gobble them up. But you shouldn’t enter the Hill thinking that way. I think you should work hard, but the point is that, but if you learn the Hill environment and you succeed there, you know you can be successful in almost anything you choose to do down the road.
Mark Strand:
Put in the effort, I mean, there’s some people that get there and it doesn’t look like the Taj Mahal they saw on the TV show with Marvel offices. You’re cramped in an office with eight other people. It’s so noisy all the time. But at the same time information floats through the air, you can practically reach up and grab it. Like he gets smarter by osmosis because C-SPAN’s on, your hearing congressional debate, your colleagues are talking about issues. It’s an amazing experience how to learn. But for instance, you’re the kind of person who needs to work with no noise in the background, it’s not a great place to work because it is noisy and it’s busy and it’s rushed and it’s hectic and deadlines come and go, and the boss needs something out of nowhere, you have to stop what you’re doing and do that too. It’s not like you can say, “No, I’m sorry. I’m working on something else.”
Mark Strand:
No. If your boss has something you need to get, you got to do it. And so it’s a tough environment, which is one of the reasons why the average person stays on the Hill less than two and a half years. And let’s say it was done a while ago. It might even be less than that now because it’s not for everybody. And there’s no shame in that if that’s not your kind of personality, but if it is, or you found a job Nirvana, because you get to work on things that are really important all the time from a very early age.
Kevin Kosar:
Interesting, interesting. Now legislators have offices, both in Washington, DC and back home in their districts and home states. Does the work differ in these offices, DC versus district and state?
Mark Strand:
Yeah, that’s a great point, Kevin, because it’s actually not only different, it’s almost two separate cultures at the same time. And a member has to pay very close attention to keep them United on the same age. Yeah. I always, I do a lot of individual office retreats, I’ll go out and spend time with both the district and DC staff, getting them together. And I always tell people, 90% of offices have trouble communicating between the district and the DC staff and the other 10% are liars, because it’s just a common theme with all offices on the Hill that they work different ways. And part of it is because, in the district, they say, “Well, you get to spend all this time with the boss, and you’re at the Capitol, and you’re at the center of attention while we’re out here working in quiet.”
Mark Strand:
And then the DC staff says, “Well, what are they doing?” Meanwhile, you’re working weekends in the district and driving the boss around, and you have your 15, 18 hour days the same way. And so they just fundamentally, don’t always understand each other about what the most important thing is that they need to do. In a district you frequently do a lot more casework and you do a lot more outreach, individual outreach, but to do those things successfully, you have to do it in cooperation with the DC office. And so the legislative staff has to work very closely with the caseworkers and the outreach staff to make sure they’re on message, and they have the latest information. And nothing worse than being an outreach staffer in the district office and going to a chamber of commerce meeting, when someone walks up and say, “Hey, I heard your boss on that radio this morning, she was really good.” And you say, “I’m sure she was. She always is”, because this DC staff forgot to tell you that your boss was going to be on the radio that day.
Mark Strand:
And so it’s interesting, the more the two officers can be each other informed the better off they are in terms of maintaining a common culture based on the boss’s priorities. The other thing too, is it also takes good management to work the differences between the two. I mean, the chief of staff has to talk weekly and regularly with the district director. The district director has to talk to all their reports. So, you have to have a common flow so that the information… The office knows what’s going on in both places at the same time. It doesn’t have to be really difficult to do either. There are little techniques you can do, but because the two are different, the DC office is very fast paced, it’s very legislatively, a communications [inaudible 00:19:54]
Mark Strand:
The district office is very people oriented and problem solving and going in to talking to people, and their individual things like two different worlds, but they’re all serving the same purpose. So, building a common culture is very important to having a success between the two. I think there’s nothing more rewarding, individually, than casework. It’s one of the few areas in Congress where you get to work on something where there is the satisfaction of seeing the job through to completion. You got somebody a lost disability check, they hadn’t gotten. You helped an immigrant get their family into the country, or you helped a small business get this loan they’d been applied for it, and that had been stuck.
Mark Strand:
I mean, this kind of stuff was very satisfying because you can see the results. Sometimes when you’re a legislative assistant, you draft a bill. One, the odds are against it seeing the light of day. But even if it does, it’ll change 10 times before it actually passes. And so you may not recognize it completely when it actually does become law. And so there’s less instant gratification working in Washington as opposed to working in a district office, but both jobs are completely necessary, both make the world turn around.
Kevin Kosar:
Ah, very good. Very good. Now you write in Surviving Inside Congress, that it is important for a staffer to develop relationships outside the office. Why? What are the benefits of networking and are these benefits, benefits for the staffer? Or benefits for the boss, both, something else?
Mark Strand:
Kevin, actually, you hit the nail on the head, actually, with the question, because that really is both. You grow a lot by meeting other people, especially look on the Hill environment is that you have a people who are at similar education levels, similar age, similar jobs, you’re kind of doing the same thing. You can only benefit from sharing your own best practices and the things you’ve learned, or coming to somebody with a particular problem if you’ve seen that they’ve dealt with it before too. So, from a personal level it’s very beneficial to meet with your colleagues and other people. It’s also important to meet with people off the Hill who are involved in the issues you care about because they have the time to think about a lot of these issues and they have a lot of resources where they can help you become smarter at the things you want to become smarter at.
Mark Strand:
But there’s another thing, too, which you talked about, why is it good for the boss? And it really is because this is how the Hill works. It’s a glue that holds it together. Is this sort of network of staffers who talk to each other outside of the earshot of the press. One of the big problems in Washington is that everything is covered by the media. So you don’t usually have a lot of trial balloons. But if you have friends, especially friends in the other party, you can call them up one day and say “Hypothetically, if my boss were to introduce this bill, hypothetically how might your boss react to that?” “Well, hypothetically speaking, if your boss introduced that bill, I think my boss might be inclined to co-sponsor that, and maybe join you for a press conference announcing it.” “Well, thank you.”
Mark Strand:
And so then you both go back and you talk to your bosses, right? And also, now your boss can go and make the ask. This is sort of how you used to float trial balloons, so it’s basically the staffers talking to each other. And so building this kind of network with your colleagues, allows you to get things done on behalf of your boss. One of the things we sponsor is we have a retreat we do for the chiefs of staff, and we do another retreat for legislative directors, and communicators. They spend time with each other, not only comparing notes and having a nice social setting, but learning things that they have in common and sharing the things they’ve done well that maybe the other staffers might want to try in their offices too.
Mark Strand:
You just become a much better and more complete staffer. There is a danger and the question applies it by the negative that you can stay in your office and work in your cubicle and spend time on your computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and still have more work to do, but you won’t be as good a staffer, because you’re just not getting the extra knowledge that can only come from conversing and fellowship with other people.
Kevin Kosar:
I’ve got two questions left, and I want to circle back to this issue of a staffer who’s made it to the Hill, and wants to get better at his or her job. What sort of training or other self-development opportunities are there out there? Certainly there’s the Congressional Institute.
Mark Strand:
Yeah, that’s a good group, the Congressional Institute. There’s a Congressional Management Foundation, which is very helpful for learning things. There are the think tanks, like American Enterprise Institute and others, Bipartisan Coalition and groups out there that spend their time working on trying to help you do your job better and trying to make the Congress, as an institution, work better. And the key thing is to take advantage of these things. So, Washington is floating in information. There’s so much knowledge here. Usually the challenges is to figure out which is valuable to you. And what you find is credible. There are think tanks that work better for them. And [inaudible 00:24:40] certainly are think tanks that work better for others. So, one group may not provide as much valuable information as another, but the key thing is for you to make those contexts, so you can get your hands on the vital information that’s necessary to do your job very well.
Mark Strand:
I would encourage you to read books on Congress, Surviving Inside Congress wouldn’t be a bad place to start, but there’s a ton of information on the history of the institution, as well as things on writing legislation, and doing things better. Always be trying to improve yourself. It’s an interesting thing, Kevin, is that I got my master’s in legislative affairs after I finished my congressional career of 24 years. And you say, “Well, why would you do that?” And what happened was, it turned out to be enormous amount of fun, because I realized on the Hill that I learned just enough information to get through that day. If the president issued an executive order, I learned just enough about that executive order for the politics of the moment, but you go to school and all of a sudden there’s a master’s program, I’m studying the different kinds of executive orders, and the history of them and how some executive orders are written on maps.
Mark Strand:
And we had accidentally been under state of emergency for 35 years because someone forgot to repeal Franklin Roosevelt’s emergency during the Great Depression. All these things, and it was fun. You enjoy learning. But the key thing I found out is that, you know what? No matter how hard you try, you never learn everything about Congress. Every day you can learn something new. So even old pros like me, and you who’ve been doing this for a while, we learn things new every day about Congress or learn a different way of looking at something. And that’s part of the fulfillment of the job. But it’s also a key thing to understand if you’re a junior staffer, is that, it goes back to one your early questions, it’s not about you, it’s about the institution, about your bosses, about your place in that system.
Mark Strand:
And the more you take that seriously, and the better you become your job better, you serve the country. And that sounds a little Pollyann-ish maybe, or, but the reality is, is that that’s your job when you’re working for Congress is to help people in the country. And it really is an unselfish thing if you do it right, but you’re also rewarded greatly the more selfish you are. It’s one of those things about servant leadership. So, working hard, learning a lot, taking advantage of the opportunities to get the training you can, and there are tons there, will make you a better person, and will make you a better public servant.
Kevin Kosar:
For my last question, let me ask if there was one last piece of wisdom that you’d want to highlight for the listeners to this podcast, whether it’s something drawn from the book or just drawn from your own personal experience about either the value of being in Congress or just how to be good at it, what would it be?
Mark Strand:
Kevin, some of the places where you and I have in common has been this area of congressional reform. And it comes from a love of this institution of the Congress. And one of the things you realize that every country has an executive and that it’s a president, or prime minister, or king, queen, emperor, chairman of the pullet burrow, whatever, but only healthy democracies have well-functioning legislatures because it’s the Congress that checks the power of the executive. So, not only is working in Congress something you should take serious because it’s a good job, and it’s an interesting job, but because you play a vital role in the preservation of democracy, it’s the sort of thing where if Congress is doing its job, our system works. It’s when Congress doesn’t do its job, or Congress gives up its power, or congress refuses to take up something because the politics are right at that moment.
Mark Strand:
Either the executive gets strengthened because the executive will always act. The Congress gives the executive power, the president will take it in the heartbeat. And so really by becoming a student of the institution and helping Congress be successful, as a staffer, you actually do a lot to preserve the idea of democracy. And the interesting thing is the older I get and the longer I’ve been doing this, the more I firmly believe that. I think if you had asked me when I was 25, if my job was to save democracy, I probably would have laughed at you unless you’re a constituent, which case I would say “Thank you very much, sir.” But even now, at this age, now that I’ve gotten to, I really have come to the conclusion that the people who work in Congress are the glue that hold our democracy together.
Mark Strand:
If that institution fails to do his job, or if it becomes too weak, we risk losing what makes this country so valuable in our system with checks and balances. So, I mean, my advice would be take the job seriously, become a student of it and defend and protect the institution of Congress against people who would see it be less successful. Yeah, one of the funny things is of course, as Americans, we’re naturally suspicious of authority and especially somebody who voluntarily wants to be elected. Our role models for our elected officials were like George Washington, and Paul Ryan, right? George Washington kept retiring and they kept having to drag them back. And so the reluctant servant, when Paul Ryan became speaker, he didn’t want the job, in fact, but that turned out to be what Americans liked most about him becoming speaker at the time, we did a survey on that.
Mark Strand:
People said they liked his Midwestern values, but what I also liked about him was that he didn’t want the job, but he was doing it because he was asked, and because he thought it was important. It’s an interesting thing, the way we work in Congress, but I guess that’s my advice. Take it seriously, work hard, be humble, and understand you’re a servant, but also you’ll be well-respected by your colleagues, which is something that most of us learn to value greatly over time.
Kevin Kosar:
Very good. Mark Strand, thank you so much for being on the program.
Mark Strand:
Kevin, thank you. It’s a real honor for me.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress. A podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Elayne Allen, and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress by a Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and Tune In. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging @AEI. We hope you have a great day.
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