Leadership Quote by Craig Washington

A politician insisting he is "not semi-retired" while admitting he is "just taking it easy" is doing a very Washington thing: managing the narrative before the narrative manages him. The line is built on a neat dodge. "Semi-retired" is a label other people apply, heavy with insinuations of irrelevance, diminished ambition, and the quiet exit. "Taking it easy" is self-authored, almost pastoral, a choice rather than a concession. Same behavior, different framing, and in politics framing is half the job.

The specific intent is defensive but genial. It answers the unasked question - Are you done? - without sounding bitter. Washington rejects the binary of power or disappearance and replaces it with a third posture: still in the game, just not grinding for airtime. The subtext is about status maintenance. Politicians rarely get to be "former" anything without losing leverage; donors, colleagues, and reporters treat retirement as permission to stop returning calls. This sentence keeps the door cracked: available for counsel, endorsements, maybe a comeback, but immune to the charge of clinging.

Context matters here because Craig Washington's career intersects with a familiar arc for public figures: after intense visibility, scandal, electoral defeat, or simply fatigue, the public expects either a redemption tour or a full vanishing act. He offers neither. The charm is in the understatement. It sounds casual, even neighborly, which is precisely the point: to downshift without surrendering. In a culture that treats ambition as identity, "taking it easy" is a quiet claim to agency.