Leadership Quote by Eddie Bernice Johnson

A politician admitting “the sting of continually losing” is doing two jobs at once: registering pain while recruiting solidarity. Eddie Bernice Johnson’s phrasing is plainspoken, almost stubbornly unpoetic, and that’s the point. “Sting” is a physical word, quick and sharp, suggesting repeated, accumulated injury rather than one dramatic defeat. “Continually” pushes the feeling from a single election-night disappointment into something structural: setbacks that keep arriving, often because the rules, the map, the money, or the chamber’s partisan math are designed to grind you down.

The key move is the opening clause: “I’m not the only one.” Johnson widens a personal lament into a collective condition. That’s coalition language. It signals to constituents, allies, and overlooked colleagues that frustration isn’t a private weakness; it’s shared evidence that a community’s priorities are being outvoted, delayed, or dismissed. In legislative life, “losing” can mean more than ballots: bills that never get a hearing, amendments stripped in conference, infrastructure dollars rerouted, rights narrowed by courts. The quote implicitly argues that persistence is rational when the losses aren’t random, but patterned.

There’s also strategy in the vulnerability. Politicians are trained to project inevitability; Johnson instead grants the emotional cost of public service, which makes her perseverance sound earned, not performative. The subtext isn’t resignation. It’s a warning and a vow: we’re hurting, we’re counting, and we’re still here.