If I have learned one thing in a half a lifetime of reading the papers, it is that you should not waste your time reading the papers. There's nothing in them most days, and what there is is always the same.

The business section is the worst for this: Stocks may go up, but then again they may go down. Analysts are divided. But the politics pages are no better. Six months ago when I decamped for New York Paul Martin was plotting to take over from Jean Chretien. He's still at it.

And yet, the longer the Adscam scandal wears on, and the more the Martinites flounder about in search of a way out of the swamp, the more that Mr. Martin seems to be sinking, inexorably, back into the old ways -- the more that Jean Chretien seems to be taking over from him.

Or perhaps we are simply seeing the real Paul Martin, stripped of the varnish of decency and invested hopes with which he took office. Perhaps the idea that he would be a different kind of Prime Minister was always a fraud, sustainable only so long as he was not actually in the job.

At any rate, I have been trying to reconcile these two contradictory images of Mr. Martin: the earnest fellow in the TV ads with the the snarling demagogue in the Commons, the Periclean democrat of his early speeches with the grubby deceits and half-measures of the past few weeks: the sandbagging of the Commons inquiry, the whisper campaign against the Auditor General (and don't think Reg Half-cocked's botched attempt was the only example of that), the non-stop campaigning across the country even as he insists a snap election is the furthest thing from his mind. I am reluctant to concede this, but by now it is evident the hot outrage of February, the determined vow to "get to the bottom" of the scandal, the promise that politics would "never be the same," was all nothing more than a charade, with no more credibility than Mr. Martin's claim to have known nothing about any funny business in Quebec.

I suppose I should not find this surprising, having written year after year of Mr. Martin's budget chicanery, which went so far as to provoke a previous Auditor General to refuse to sign the books. But at the time, even as I tut-tutted at this duplicity, a part of me thought, well, this is just part of the game, isn't it? That's politics. Of course he has to mislead and confuse the public how their own money is to be spent. How else is he supposed to proceed?

That is what politics does: it drags you down to its level. And this I think is the clue to the riddle of Paul Martin. It isn't that he is devious by nature. In another context, another trade, he would probably be a scrupulously honest person. That is not to make excuses for him, but it does help to explain the contradiction.

As a thought experiment, imagine how Mr. Martin might have proceeded. Suppose, when the scandal broke, he had told something approaching the truth, something like the following:

I can't claim to be shocked by these revelations, because in truth I knew something was seriously amiss in this government's ethics. I may not have known the exact names of the people responsible or the precise natures of their crimes, but I knew enough, because I knew more than you knew, and what you knew -- what everybody knew -- was more than enough.

We have all become far too adept over the years at looking the other way, and I regret to say that I, who was in a position to see more than most, did more than most to avert my eyes. We -- I -- drew the line at criminality, but we should have drawn it well before then. It's like placing a guard rail at the very edge of a cliff: By then it's too late to stop.

If I did nothing to stop it over the years, it was because I persuaded myself that the time was not yet ripe to confront Mr. Chretien. Perhaps I was wrong to think that way. Perhaps I should have resigned in protest. But if I was right, then I ask you to bear with me, because now my time is at hand. And if I was wrong, then I ask only for the chance to make amends. Because I am going to put things right...

Alas, that is the speech he never gave. Perhaps Mr. Martin thought of saying something like this, and rejected it, for fear that he could not get a hearing if he admitted what he had known. More likely it didn't occur to him. He has been a part of the political game for decades, and sooner or later politics winkles the honesty out of you, until at last the truth becomes a foreign language, something you are unable to speak except with great effort. Vaclav Havel wrote of "living in truth," a project to which he dedicated his life, as a writer and a dissident, to the point of imprisonment. People in politics, by the same token, live in falsehood. Their waking moments are constructed of an elaborate series of lies -- I am not campaigning, the party is not divided, I have no recollection of that, I knew nothing -- so familiar and so routine that they themselves would be unconscious of telling them.

That initial failure of imagination in turn helps explain the larger failure of vision that has undercut his promises of more substantive reforms. The best comparison I can make is with Mikhail Gorbachev: a decent man, but one who, whatever his reformist leanings, remained trapped within the ideology he was born into. He knew something was wrong, even had a vague idea of changing the system, but he could not imagine how another system might work or fully grasp what was required. And so, like so many reformers, he was overtaken by the revolutionary forces he unleashed, and consumed by them.

Mr. Martin is in a similar plight. Like Mr. Gorbachev, he is not there to tear down the system but to save it. He knows that something has to change. But just as he cannot bring himself to really level with the public, he cannot see far enough to take the more radical measures that are really required, because to do so -- to shut down the regional development agencies, to keep ministers at arms-length from departmental management, to take the politics out of public spending -- would amount to tearing down the whole apparatus of Liberal machine politics and beginning again. And because he cannot see that far, someone else, a Yeltsin, will have to do it for him.