A Three-Act Play?

Someone I interviewed a while back said something like, "You know the truth of it is, seems like no sane person can stand more than three terms in the U.S. Senate; look how it ends up that way."

That was the Bob Graham-Lawton Chiles way of doing it.

When the last years are the worst, it's tempting to look at 18 years in the Senate as a tragedy in three acts. You introduce the gun at the end of the first act. Somebody picks it up in the second act. Then it fires in the third act.

When the Chiles-MacKay transition team finally got a look at how bad their budget shortfall would be in 1991-1992, someone on the staff commented, "It was like walking in on the third act of a tragedy."