It’s hard to imagine Ed Rollins playing moralist, but there he was at the National Press Club in Washington last month, a Jeremiah with warm-up jokes. Distrust of the political system has reached dangerous levels among voters, he told his audience; the public is “cynical,” even “disgusted,” with the process, and with the duplicitous people who participate in it. “We all suffer as a nation when that occurs,” he said sadly. Moments later, he recalled his brief tenure as Ross Perot’s campaign manager during the 1992 presidential campaign. “The greatest contribution I’ve made to American politics,” he said, “is I took Ross Perot from 39 percentage points to 17 in six weeks.”

If it seemed strange to hear Rollins show savage disloyalty to a former paying client in the middle of a speech on the horrors of cynicism, the journalists listening didn’t catch it. Actually, they laughed and applauded. But then, his comments were no stranger than the fact that Rollins was speaking publicly on politics at all. Just three years ago he was humiliated and disgraced after bragging that he had paid black people not to vote while running Christie Whitman’s campaign for governor of New Jersey. Those unsophisticated in the ways of politics might have assumed that Rollins’s public life would end right there. Those very same naifs probably think Dick Morris’s career in politics has ended too. Wrong again.