Campaigning is fun; governance is hard. Maybe that’s why several elected officials, who won election to the Virginia General Assembly on November 7, already have announced their intention to run for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District seat in 2024. Call me traditional, but when you run for office, you are making a commitment to serve for the full term of office, or so I thought. To announce for another seat within days of winning an election smacks of ego, hubris or, perhaps, pursuit of a higher salary (General Assembly members earn about $18,000 a year plus a per diem for days in session; Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year). What do you tell the voters who just elected you? “Oops, I didn’t mean it.” “The grass is greener over there.” “Constituents are not a priority; my ego (or pocketbook) is.”

Any campaign for public office is expensive these days, and congressional campaigns are especially expensive. The “purple” tint of the 10th Congressional District makes it a swing district, so both political parties will spend millions to win the seat in a closely divided Congress. General Assembly members may not raise money during the session, which will run from January 10 to March 9, 2024, so they must use the next couple of months to rebuild war chests for the primary campaign. Will their focus be on preparing for the session, or on raising money? Something, like representation of their constituents, may suffer; not what the voters anticipated just last week.

Charlie Clark and I shared our opinions on the pages of the Falls Church News Press for many years, and I always enjoyed reading his “Our Man in Arlington” column about the jurisdiction neighboring Mason District and Fairfax County. I envied Charlie’s ability to bring history alive via interviews with so many Arlingtonians. He always seemed to connect the past and the present, even in small everyday things.

Several years ago, Charlie and I got together for lunch at Seven Corners. Charlie had written several books, and I wanted to learn more about that process, how to engage a publisher, and what pitfalls to avoid. It was a delightful conversation, made more so by the discovery that we both attended the University of Oregon. We lived in Eugene several years apart (I was born and raised there; he lived there only a couple of years during college), but Charlie still exhibited a fondness for his time in the Willamette Valley. We both marveled about how two Oregon Ducks ended up writing local columns for the Falls Church News Press for so many years.

I learned that Charlie was quite ill only very recently, and never got to send him a note before he died last week. I would have thanked him for years of introducing so many readers, and me, to Arlington history, and for being such a positive presence in the lives of Northern Virginians for decades. As we gather for Thanksgiving on Thursday, we can give thanks that talented people like Charlie Clark gave extra effort to understand and enhance our wonderfully diverse community.

• Penny Gross is the Mason District Supervisor, in the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. She may be emailed at mason@fairfaxcounty.gov.