Joe Sobran remembers Eugene McCarthy.

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I met McCarthy briefly in Minneapolis about that time and told him how much I’d admired him in 1968, something he no doubt heard thousands of times for the rest of his life. When I told him I was now writing for Bill Buckley’s National Review, he smiled: “I’ve always thought Bill was playing poker with Monopoly money.” It was the kind of gently barbed, slightly enigmatic witticism you’d expect from him.

Yeah, that's pure genius, Joe.

I met him again in Baton Rouge a few years later, where I was supposed to debate him; but the debate turned into an all-out tribute from the moment he was introduced. Everyone remembered him as the hero of 1968. I could only join the roar of the crowd.

Earlier that day he’d invited me to join him for breakfast, where we had a long conversation about that wonderful year. He recalled the dirty tricks of the Kennedy people; on the day of the California primary, they’d tried to scare voters with leaflets claiming he had a plan to bus blacks from Watts to Orange County. It was a preposterous lie, but there had been no time to rebut it. Bobby was even more cynical than I’d always thought! So much for Camelot. But that night he was murdered anyway, and McCarthy told me the story not with bitterness, but with something like amusement, ironic and philosophical. No wonder he’d gotten out of politics after his moment of glory.

Funny how he kept getting back into politics, eh, Joe?

Politics, I reflected, was a strange business for a man like Gene McCarthy to have been in at all. George Will has written of his “condescension” to the public, but I think his appeal was just the opposite of that: he never talked down to you, whether you were part of a cheering crowd or a companion at the breakfast table. He was that rare thing, a politician without bombast. After an hour with a man like that, you realize how inflated John McCain’s “straight talk” really is.

Ouch!

So in Gene McCarthy’s honor, I think it’s enough to say that he spoke with intelligence and candor, he raised our expectations of politicians, and, once upon a time, he was there when we really needed him. No hyperbole is necessary. He is gone now, and it hurts.