Politics & Power Quote by George J. Mitchell

Mitchell’s line reads like an origin story stripped of mythology: politics didn’t descend as a calling, it arrived as exposure. The sentence is built on a quiet contrast - “a job with a law firm” suggests stability, private ambition, a respectable off-ramp. Then comes the hinge: “But by then.” That small phrase carries the weight of conversion, implying that something irreversible happened in the meantime. He’s not claiming ideological purity or youthful destiny; he’s describing contagion. Politics, in his telling, is a spark you catch by proximity to someone who makes it look consequential.

The subtext is mentorship as recruitment, not in the cynical sense of backroom grooming, but in the more realistic way institutions reproduce themselves: talented staff watch power up close, learn its rhythms, and start wanting to be inside the room where decisions become history. “Through meeting Senator Muskie, through seeing what he did” doubles down on the tactile. Not “reading,” not “believing,” not “dreaming” - seeing. Muskie becomes a proof-of-concept for public service, a demonstration that politics can be work, not just theater.

Context matters: Muskie was a serious governing figure in an era when the Senate still marketed itself as a place for policy craftsmanship. Mitchell, who would later become synonymous with negotiation and legislative patience, frames his political awakening not as a response to spectacle but as an apprenticeship in competence. It’s a modest sentence with an ambitious implication: the most durable political ambition is often borrowed first, then slowly made one’s own.