So yesterday was the big, much-hyped debate between Eliot and Tom for the gubernatorial nomination. Expectations were high for Team Suozzi, considering that their expenditures to date of roughly six million dollars have actually pushed their candidate down into the single digits. I'm not really quite sure, cursed with excessive rationality as I am, what they thought would happen during this debate; perhaps Spitzer sodomizing a telegenic child on live television?

At what point does a campaign get more about salving the wounded ego of the candidate than about, say, winning? What tangible, realistic rationale for his candidacy can Tom offer today that would lay out a clear case for him, other than that ironclad belief he has in his own exceptional talents?

Tom Suozzi wants to be governor. Fine. The problem is simply that not very many people other than himself and perhaps his immediate family share that desire. At this point in the season, it seems that the Suozzi campaign is kept in being more by what I'd diagnose as a dearth of campaign staffers with the courage to tell the candidate the bad news than by any other factor. Somebody should step up to that disagreeable task sometime soon, as this stillborn campaign continues to go through what everyone realizes are the mere motions, before it degrades further from a Simpsons episode into the more Shakespearean depths that Suozzi seems determined to plumb. Unfortunately, Nassau is not the most promising location for King Lear, and there are no things more noble at stake than a sense of entitlement arising from a miscalculated sense of self.

You're not going to be governor, Tom, not this year. And if you go down this path much further, you're not going to be anything else, either.

There is no shame in losing; there is humiliation in being the last to acknowledge the writing on the wall. In the case of Tom Suozzi's lonely desire to be governor, that writing on the wall is flashing with all the subtlety of Times Square at midnight, and it says "It's over".