Politicians are different from you and me, and no one has ever explained it all better than Elizabeth Drew in The New Yorker, as she followed the hopeless presidential campaign of Edward M. Kennedy as it ground to its preordained end. “Kennedy arrived in New York yesterday … as strident as … ever,” she wrote August 9, 1980.

“He seemed almost crazed, a caricature. A number of people … even some of his staff, have become puzzled about what he thinks he is doing. Leaving aside the style in which he is doing it, the question is not so puzzling. Kennedy and his people are aware that the odds against his getting the nomination are long indeed, but they have travelled all year on the theory that at some point the bubble around Carter would burst …