“There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”
From now on—maybe for a long time, maybe forever—he would wonder about things he hadn’t before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.
That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed.
