Poor Ed Rollins! What an astonishing outpouring he provoked. All through November and well into December the media seemed unable to let his story go, even after the New Jersey Democrats had given up shaking the exiguous evidence like a terrier in the hope that it would yield a hint of illegality. Whether you believe Story No. 1, about his having paid off black ministers to dampen further their (and their congregations’) already soggy enthusiasm for the re-election of Governor Jim Florio, or the subsequent denial in Story No. 2 that any such thing ever happened, your heart has to go out to him. It’s not every day that you see a man in public life destroy his own career in a matter of seconds.

My first reaction to Story No. 1 was that it seemed rather bad form to be bragging about it, but that here was obviously heads-up campaigning. Just goes to show you why I am unlikely ever to be elected to anything. A professional like Rollins must have realized as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he had crossed an inviolable boundary between what even the frankest of political insiders may say and what everyone knows but no one must say. It is no secret that such skullduggery is a commonplace of urban politics—which is why Rollins expected the reporters to admire a particularly clever bit of it, a rare example of Republican walking-around money outbidding the Democratic variety. Yet