In his announcement, Senator Brownback talked about waging war on cancer. Here’s Marvin Olasky (the original “compassionate conservative” on Brownback’s brush with it:

Brownback said his sense of total dependence on God came when he was diagnosed with cancer in August 1995 and remained unsure about the outcome for another nine months: “That’s when I felt helpless.” He came out of that with a clean bill of health medically and a lesson he absorbed from Senate chaplain Richard Halverson: “I have only one constituent: God.”