He did pay a price insofar as it was an albatross which prevented him from ever becoming President. No guarantee he would have been President, of course, but this was a deal killer.

Peter: yes the facts are murky and the situation is unrelated to his performance as a Senator and my personal assessment of that performance. I’m most offended that he never paid a price for what he did (not counting any anguish and regret he may have or does feel).

The transformation of Michelle Obama from a bracingly proud contemporary woman — mother, wife, career woman — into a prime time Betty Crocker was sad to see. This is not to say that she was not up to the task assigned her Monday night. She spoke well and looked swell. But her speech was like one of those buildings where the interior structure can be seen. You could watch her hit all her marks, answering, point by point, the uninformed criticism: angry, although mighty privileged, black woman. Never mind that that was a canard. Just as much a canard was the woman who spoke almost entirely of motherhood and wifehood and the incredible greatness of America — a land once of searing racism, which, if mentioned, is seen as proof of irrational rage and for which whites now have three words: get over it.

The transparent purpose of the speech, its kitchy effort to reassure, gave Michelle Obama a glaze of insincerity. In the post-speech commentary, many of the TV types, schooled now in empathy and not objectivity, gave her high marks for what she did. But what she had really done, she had done earlier in her life. Last night, she gave the standard “Log Cabin” speech expected of nearly all American public figures — born poor, raised in faith, etc. — with nary a mention of race. It was a speech designed to reassure, but it did not do that at all. Politics can sometimes be ugly. In this case, we witnessed how a dynamic woman with a razor-sharp intellect had — for the moment — been lobotomized. If it happens also to her husband, John McCain will have one more house come January.

Ted Kennedy “left Mary Jo Kopechne to die under circumstances where, if he had not given priority to preserving his political career, she might well have been saved. He passed by one house after another where he might have called the emergency rescue squad, and instead sought out his cousin Joe Gargan, whom he implored to take the fall for him. When Gargan refused, he divided the remainder of the night between phone calls to the family lawyer and attempts to establish an alibi by repeatedly wandering down to the lobby of the hotel where he was staying and engaging the hotel clerk in a conversation about the time of night. Never, apparently, did he give a thought to the young woman whom he left dying in his submerged car.”

He has done a lot since that is laudable in intent (the aforementioned commitment to doing what he believes best for Massachusetts and the United States), but you can’t convince me that he did anything but protect himself while Mary Jo drowned.

Of course, Mary Jo died and Harry did not. However, both events could have gone the other way. Neither man intended to cause harm. Both were negligent in their acts.

This is not to excuse Teddy or to cast blame at Cheney: only to place the events in context.

To be clear: there is no excuse for Chappaquiddick…but a man’s life is made up of more than one moment, no matter how horrific that moment may be.

But I understand your sentiment, and I also understand fully that Kennedy robbed a young lady of every moment, good and bad, she would ever know…just trying to explain why I don’t share the sentiment, at least not entirely, despite the enormity of the mistake…