I still think he'll win by three points on election night, but what he will never win back is my respect. He really was, during the 1980s and much of the 1990s, not simply a politician I believed in but THE politician I beleved in. Among officeholders of significant rank, he was the guy whose integrity I regarded as unbreachable. I did not always agree with him, but I did believe that he arrived at his opinions through serious reflection.

I don't believe that anymore. I feel like Benjy, the "idiot" in "The Sound and the Fury," when he says Caddy doesn't smell like trees anymore. Joe has lost his innocence. He's an opportunist, a self-seeker, like all the rest....

Funny thing, that. This is kind of a farewell tour, too. One of the lessons he might have learned this time, by losing a primary, is that he had fallen out of touch with his home people. He spent too much time seeking the national limelight and had a hard time even mounting a field operation here where he lives. That might have told him he needed to water his roots....

I will never give him back the faith and the trust I invested in him when I was young and looking for people in public life whom I could admire. And there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like me. People who believed in him and never will again. People who are now creeped out. That thing we gave him was a pearl beyond price. Losing it, he should feel like he's watching Tinkerbell die on stage, while he claps his hands and she doesn't stir.

posted by tparty at 9:30 PM