Jeff Frederick, who took over as chairman of the Virginia Republican Party after the convention decision, told me: “People statewide sometimes forget this  Tom Davis has been a team player. Although he’s sometimes in intense battles, when it comes time to close ranks, he closes ranks and fights for the team.”

It may be that fighting for the team is what has taken such a toll on Davis. The cost of loyalty  reconciling his own centrist, pragmatic instincts with the demands of a conservative party  seems to weigh on him. “You’ve got to, quote, ‘play the game,’ ” he told me. “If you want advancement, you’ve got to adhere to the party lines on a lot of issues.”

During one of our conversations last month, I asked him whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq. He stared at me intently without answering for quite a while, as if trying to decide whether to say what he really thought. On my tape, it counts out to eight long seconds before he spoke, but at the time, it seemed longer. Finally, he said softly: “I don’t want to go there. We’re where we are. I don’t think we need to revisit that issue. Probably the facts speak for themselves.”

Then he tried to explain his vote. “Our vote to go to war was a vote to give permission,” he said. “It wasn’t a vote to go to war. It wasn’t a declaration of war. The president was trying to get inspectors in there and he said, ‘Look, we’re going to do this the hard way or the easy way.’ And if you don’t stand behind the president in those circumstances, you kind of pull the rug out from under him. You know what I’m saying? Now, if you knew it was going to come out this way, that’s a different answer.”

At the same time, he seems angry his team did not stand behind him, particularly on his effort to give the District of Columbia a full-fledged member of the House. Davis tried to address longstanding Republican objections by balancing what would be a new safe Democratic seat by adding a safe Republican seat in Utah at the same time. It passed the House, but Republicans filibustered in the Senate. And he took it as a sign. “The party leadership,” he said, “has kind of signaled that since I was not a hard-core social conservative, any advancement was going to be over them, not with them.”

For a smart, connected guy like Davis, doors will open. After 29 years in public office, he said he wants to earn money before retirement, spend time with his wife and go to more baseball games. He has started teaching. I went to one of his first classes at George Mason University. There was the boyish enthusiast I remembered from the 1980s, lecturing on cultural politics of the South and rattling off election results over the past century. At one point, discussing voting rights for felons, he allowed that not all felons are Democrats. “There are a lot of Republican felons,” he said. “I served with them in Congress.”

But the students did not come alive until he threw the discussion open for questions and they asked about Sarah Palin. “The base hated McCain; it was a marriage of convenience,” Davis told them. “What are the negatives? What about her résumé? I got through it in about 10 seconds. Does that hurt? He’s the guy running on experience  ‘3 a.m., I’m the guy.’ And she’s a heartbeat away.” On the other hand, Davis said, Republicans can argue they would make history just as Democrats would with Barack Obama. “She helps on the change issue, doesn’t she? She’s sure change, isn’t she?”