Senator Phil Gramm waves after endorsing Senator Bob Dole for president in New Hampshire on February 18, 1996. (Gary Hershorn / Reuters)

“Ferdinand Piëch, Domineering Volkswagen Chief, Dies at 82,” read the headline in the New York Times. Frankly, he seems to have been a bit of an SOB. A passage from the obit reminded me of Phil Gramm — not an SOB. Here is the passage in question:

“Only when a company is in severe difficulty does it let in someone like me,” Mr. Piëch wrote in his autobiography, with startling frankness. “In normal, calm times, I never would have gotten a chance.”

In 2001, I interviewed and wrote about Phil Gramm, the Texas senator: “Our Splendid Cuss.” There is not a proper “copy” of this piece on the Internet — not that I could find — but here is sort of a makeshift one. Anyway, I was always a Gramm fan — a “Gramm cracker,” as we called ourselves.

He ran for president in 1996, not getting very far. In 2001, I wrote,

He raised a lot of money, but not a lot of supporters. What went wrong? “I was a poor candidate. I did a bad job. There’s no one to blame but myself.” What’s more, “America was never going to elect me unless there was a crisis. And people didn’t see a crisis in 1996. I was the wrong person at the wrong time. And there may never have been a right time for me.”

Hell, it’s always the right time for you, Gramm.