I have heard the most vile, malicious nonsense you could imagine about almost every one of the last eight premiers.
Some people spread stories innocently, with wide-eyed naivet脙漏. A few tell lies deliberately. Some pass the tales on with a sense of obligation -- directly from a cousin, whose sister lives next door to a guy who knows a deputy minister.
The rumours and gossip come with any leadership job. They always have and they always will. But when Premier Gordon Campbell took over in 2001, this stuff came thicker and faster than ever before.
Maybe it was the revolutionary growth of the Internet that started a few years before his first term.
Not to blame the Internet. It's neutral. It amplifies the good as well as the bad. But there was also something about Campbell himself that seemed to activate the rumour mill and turn argument into invective, and disagreement into name-calling.
It ebbed and flowed over the years, but it never really went away.
That's what he was alluding to during his resignation announcement when he talked about the nasty underside of politics.
He took the time to point out that his family paid a price for his 26 years in public life. "Politics can be a very nasty business and at times that spilled over, through no fault of their own, to all my family."
Yesterday, at his follow-up question and answer session with reporters, Campbell was invited to discuss that touchy issue again. The length of his answer -- 2 1/2 minutes ---seems to show he has serious concerns.
Campbell said public life is a huge gift and "we all have to raise our games."
"We all lose when people do say: 'There is no way I would ever put myself forward for public office because of the commentary that takes place, because of the things people say,'" he said.
The gossip seemed to create a sort of reservoir of mistrust. When the harmonized sales tax hit in the summer of 2009, that reservoir started to churn all over again.
Hundreds of thousands of people hate the HST for well-thought-out, defensible reasons. Lots more object to how it was imposed.
They all disapprove of Campbell as a result.
But there's a sizable pocket of people whose disagreement over policy morphed into a visceral hatred of Campbell. It's a routine feature on the blogs and the reader comment pages of all the media websites. Some of it is simply over the top.
The biggest change on the B.C. scene now that Campbell is checking out might be that everyone takes a deep breath and chills. He'll likely have a much lower profile while he's simply minding the store for his successor. And if Campbell has any political feel left, he'll fade further into the background when someone else takes over.
The recall drive will be less an anti-Campbell movement and more a debate on how individual Liberals responded to the HST.
The same with the eventual referendum on the tax. Voting just to render a verdict on Campbell would be wasting a vote. The issue is more the merits and demerits of the tax.
The nastiness didn't dominate the discourse, but it was always there around the edges. B.C. is still a far cry from the U.S., where vitriol is running rampant.
B.C. novelist William Gibson came up with an arresting phrase a few years ago to describe the scene south of the border. He called it a "cold civil war."
Things have grown even worse since he wrote that. It's disturbing to watch from afar. And it's sobering to see how easily it starts. The nastiness begins at ground level, where a few people abandon all reason and restraint and start personalizing issues and attacking people, rather than ideas.
Nobody runs for office to do bad things, Campbell said during his discussion of the nastiness. By this point, even that motherhood observation would be disputed by some of the more ardent haters.
One of the undeniable benefits of him leaving will be that some of the haters will fade away along with him.
