It doesn't take much for the tables to be turned in the cutthroat world of politics. One gaffe will do it. Say something wrong and your political foes will bear down on you like a pack of hungry hounds, as they did with Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen last week. One minute he was basking in the afterglow of his well-received policy speech and the next he was being torn to bits for saying too much democracy could lead to Cultural-Revolution-style turmoil.
Mr Tsang doesn't really believe democracy will bring lawlessness to Hong Kong. The Cultural Revolution analogy was intended simply as a debating point for his argument that unrestrained power in the hands of the people does not make for good government. It was a flawed analogy in that even extreme democracy does not translate into unrestrained people power when upheld by the rule of law. But in any case, in the age of attack politics, engaging the public in intellectual debate is the equivalent of digging yourself a large hole to fall into.
People prefer their politicians to speak in simple terms, not in professorial tones that make their heads spin. Besides, intellectual debates make you say things for the sake of argument. But one slip, and you risk sounding silly. In politics, it is far safer to stick to your message than to stick your neck out. US presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani's attempt at intellect - 'We don't all agree on everything. I don't agree with myself on everything' - made him look so silly that it drew ridicule from his competitors.
It was only recently that Mr Tsang fell into a hole with his boast that Hong Kong's life expectancy, which is among the highest in the world, proved that our air pollution wasn't that bad after all, since people weren't dying early. Once bitten, twice shy, you would have thought - but he seems to have missed that lesson.
Most people forget political gaffes over time but, by then, the people have already defined the politicians by the gaffes they made. Legislative Council by-election candidate Anson Chan Fang On-sang committed a whopper of a gaffe by cutting short a democracy march for a haircut at a beauty salon. That further burned her image into the public mind as a fake democrat.
Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee's image as a Beijing lackey was deeply burned into the public mind after her 2003 gaffe that democracy produced monsters like Adolf Hitler. As a result, she had to apologise recently when it came back to haunt her in her election battle with Mrs Chan. The late Ma Lik took pride in his image as a Beijing loyalist but earned derision with his gaffe that it could not have been possible for military tanks to crush Tiananmen Square protesters into mincemeat during the 1989 uprising, and this could be proved by running tanks over pigs.