Frist can talk the talk but he can't walk the walk. Just the kind of bendover guy the White House needs in the Senate.

It is worth noting, in both the Sudan and aids fights, that Frist's instincts were right. He placed his concern for Africa's suffering people above the free-market fundamentalism and anti-foreign-aid dogmatism that inhibit many other conservatives from pursuing truly compassionate policies toward the world's poorest continent. If left to his own devices, Frist would have enacted policies that would have saved African lives.

But Frist wasn't left alone. He confronted a White House with far less noble priorities, and, by making those priorities his own, he preserved the political alliance that has now made him the most powerful Republican in the U.S. Senate. Some recent Frist profiles have wondered whether this heart and lung surgeon, used to the independence and control of the operating room, can master the deal-making, morally compromised, hyper-political world of the U.S. Senate. The answer, sadly, is that he already has.