You can make a pretty good case that the Presidency is at best a job no human can do truly well. But the Senator Majority Leader is a job that has been performed brilliantly in recent years by at least Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, George Mitchell, and Lyndon Johnson, and everyone has good reason to think Harry Reid can carry it off too. So what happened to Senator Frist? Certainly he was easily smart enough and popular enough with his party's base to do well, and yet he leaves wearing the shroud of disappointment.

The start of the fall was that the White House forced the Senator on an unwilling caucus, where Senator Lott had previously demonstrated the requisite skills and affection for the job of Leader. Rule one: the Senate picks the Majority Leader, not the White House. The next step down the declining road was Senator Frist's development of the aspiration to be President. Rule two: the Majority Leader can't run for President and do a good job as majority leader. But the big fall was the videotape diagnosis of an apparently comatose or brain-dead individual who was not, in any case, the patient of any Senator. Rule three: a Majority Leader's symbolic (as well as real) politics have to be rooted in sensible, possibly passable legislative proposals, not in extremist gestures aimed at minority factions.

In this respect, Senator Frist's disappointment is just another dimension of the sad outcome enveloping all parts of this Administration. There's not a branch, department or agency that is immune from the fall-out stemming from the Administration's decision, at the top, to rule from the extreme right instead of from the middle. Everyone seemed to like Bob Woodward's "denial" claim, but it's not really accurate: the problem for the last six years has not been that the White House has denied reality, but rather that as it has repeatedly stated it has wished to impose its own reality. In other words, this President has always and continually wanted to move America's culture to the right, by using law and leadership to drive that change. He hasn't denied the way America is; he has wanted to change it. He never liked the direction of the country's culture in the 60's. He was a true believer in the post hoc explanation that only the media and the Democrats "defeated" South Vietnam. He thought bellicosity was the best part of the American battle in the Cold War. He believed that his father should have conquered Baghdad. He always thought that intransigence and truculence were good ways to get his way.

The myth was that he knew how to compromise to get his way; there was precious little of that in his political world-view. And all these opinions, attitudes and perspectives have now been rejected most recently by Secretary Baker's group, but in passing one of the victims of the bankruptcy of this thinking was Senator Frist's political career.