A WaPo examination, one of many we will undoubtedly see in the next couple of years..

But how can a person be humble and also believe he should be president of the most powerful country in the world?

"It’s one of the most humbling things on Earth," Brownback says, his voice soft. "Look at the nature and the difficulty of that job and the greatness of this country and the need to be humble and wise to serve. Plus it’s just, it’s like, pride was the first sin and humility’s the first grace . . ."

"I think Reagan had it right that you don’t pursue the presidency, it pursues you."

But a man who expects a crop must first till the soil. Brownback knows this. He still goes home to his childhood farm for the spring planting and the fall harvest of the wheat.

He used to keep a tennis ball can filled with Kansas dirt in his office as a symbol "of what I physically return to," he says. "It’s just a great reminder that you serve for a period, you serve for a season and then you move on."

Brownback says he imagines future generations walking the halls of Congress and nobody knowing who he was. He imagines people passing a "Brownback Room" and someone saying, "Who was he?"

Perhaps someone else might answer that Sam Brownback was a complicated man, who thought himself a servant and a potential president at the same time, who imagined his life forgotten even as he dreamed of a room named after himself.