John Boehner, the presumptive speaker-elect, had to fight a rather extended choking-up episode in his victory speech last night. What got to him was talking about his own humble origins and how far he had come, to be standing where he was on Election Day 2010. He was unable to turn in a polished performance on that topic — and I have to say, that resonated with me more than it made me uncomfortable.

For one thing, Boehner’s personal emotion — welling up, it appeared, somewhat unexpectedly — was in fact personal. He didn’t perceive himself or his party to have achieved a “sociological triumph,” of the kind attributed by columnist David Corn, in his election-eve piece, to the Obama win in 2008. For Boehner, there is still a wary, hard-headed Midwestern distinction between the personal and the political, and it’s the personal that can make him cry.

This, in turn, gets at something David Brooks called for in his election-eve column: an attitude of “modesty” from triumphant Republicans about their prospects for turning the ship of state. I thought at the time that the noun Brooks picked was the wrong one, but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Boehner’s low-key speech last night clarified it for me. I’m not convinced that modesty — as Brooks conceives it — is universally appropriate for applying principles of governance; some of the principles, at least, must be held to without temporizing, caveat, or the soft defeatism of low expectations about their performance. If modesty about such principles were an unbreachable principle in itself, there would be no Bill of Rights attached to our Constitution.

But an attitude of humility will go a very long way — and that’s what I saw in Boehner last night. Unlike Obama, unlike Nancy Pelosi, he did not perceive himself as a victorious “type,” using the vehicle of electoral politics to achieve sociological triumphs. I don’t think his voters see politics or government in that light either.  There is a profound humility in observing the distinction between the personal and the political, and that quality continues to resonate with a core constituency of Americans. As a people, we have resisted being herded into heroic ideological schemes; we don’t elect our government to disrupt our lives or transform us.

We will see in the next two years how this native skepticism holds out against President Obama’s utterly ideological approach. There are no guarantees with humility alone. But humility is a start.