Leadership Quote by David Obey

A wall sign is a politician's version of a grounding ritual: a private sentence turned into a public compass. David Obey's line reads like a blunt antidote to Washington's most durable sickness - the impulse to treat governing as a series of favors dispensed to "somebody else" on behalf of whoever has the most leverage in the room. It's framed as a question, but it's really a rebuke. The "you" isn't a single person; it's the chorus of donors, lobbyists, party operatives, and interest-group emissaries who arrive with beautifully packaged moral urgencies that just happen to align with their material interests.

The craft is in the asymmetry. "Do to somebody else" versus "do for you" flips the usual script of political persuasion. Constituents are told to accept policies because they'll help others, because it's good for the country, because it's necessary. Obey's formulation demands that the persuader own the tradeoff: if you're asking me to spend my finite time, votes, and credibility on your proxy battle, explain why that outranks a direct obligation to you. It's a challenge to the politics of symbolic altruism - the way appeals to "others" can become camouflage for self-dealing.

Obey, a long-serving appropriator, lived in the realm where priorities become line items and narratives become budgets. The sign's subtext is procedural morality: governing is triage. Every request is competing not just with an opposing ideology, but with someone's rent, hospital bill, school, road, or job back home. The sentence is short enough to remember, sharp enough to sting, and specific enough to keep a career from drifting into autopilot.