This has little to do with politics directly, but the lesson of the intense emotional attachment to fame may explain why once-celebrated political figures often hate to fade into the background. In New York magazine, Rosanne Barr – you remember, from the 1990s sitcom – tells a tale of her rise and fall, using one eye-popping metaphor:

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment Roseanne dropped out of the top ten, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous! I clearly remember that blackest of days, when I had my office call the Palm restaurant for reservations on a Saturday night, at the last second as per usual. My assistant, Hilary, who is still working for me, said—while clutching the phone to her chest with a look of horror, a look I can recall now as though it were only yesterday: “The Palm said they are full!” Knowing what that really meant sent me over the edge. It was a gut shot with a sawed-off scattershot, buckshot-loaded pellet gun.

Er… really? Really? Being told that you can’t get a late reservation at the hoity-toitiest of Hollywood restaurants really felt like “a gut shot with a sawed-off scattershot, buckshot-loaded pellet gun”?

You know what I suspect is more likely to feel like “a gut shot with a sawed-off scattershot, buckshot-loaded pellet gun”? An actual gut shot with a sawed-off scattershot, buckshot-loaded pellet gun. I think just about anything else is probably not quite as bad.

Rosanne actually begins her article with a bit of (seemingly hard-learned) wisdom about fame: “It’s hard to handle and drives you nuts. Yes, it’s true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it’s a cutthroat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble. ‘Winning’ in Hollywood means not just power, money, and complimentary smoked-salmon pizza, but also that everyone around you fails just as you are peaking. When you become No. 1, you might begin to believe, as Cher once said in an interview, that you are ‘one of God’s favorite children,’ one of the few who made it through the gauntlet and survived.”

Of course, that’s Hollywood… Washington is completely different. Right?