Perhaps he'd led too sheltered a life in the upper echelons of society, at one remove from the gritty industrial reality most of his fellows have to endure.
Still, it's barely credible that even a few good men should rise to positions of power in a country founded on rampant capitalism and whose primary purpose, as advertising guru Edward Bernays declared, is "to consume". In such environment, corruption swiftly flowers.
Here in little old Godzone we may not buy and sell our politicians to quite the same extent as the US does, but there's a palpable and growing disconnect between the wealthy elite and the ordinary citizen that threatens to dismantle our own vaunted egalitarianism.
This has been illustrated lately by the cavalier reactions of former National ministers to the problems the Labour coalition is discovering in our primary infrastructure: the rotting leaky hospitals, the overcrowded "temporary" classrooms, the dearth of affordable housing, the shonky "repairs" made to hundreds of homes of victims of the Christchurch earthquakes.
To hear Steven Joyce, Gerry Brownlee, Jonathon Coleman et al tell it, the billion-dollar fiscal holes each of these issues have punched in the government's intended budget are not, even after nine years of neglect, their fault at all.
No, somehow it's Labour's doing, for wanting to spend more on social services, that is putting pressure on their ability to fix the mess accumulated under National.
Talk about no care and no responsibility. Not to mention cunning use of the "big lie" principle. Very Trumpian.
As is, at local level, the subtle (and not-so) belittling of Hawke's Bay Regional Council's plan to finally put some real effort into cleaning up our once-pristine but now polluted waterways by former and even still-present members of that council under whose watch things degraded to such a disgraceful state.
Former chairman Fenton Wilson, deputy Ewan McGregor, and still-somehow-incumbent councillor Alan Dick have all damned with faint praise and not a little niggle the tough decision HBRC has made to impose a significant rates rise in order to improve our precious ecosystems.
Surely our standards haven't slipped so far that we're inclined to accept reversal of blame from those who have allowed the problem? Just because it will cost more money to fix what, in my opinion, they ignored?
If that's true, then even if he was playing for the cameras, Comey has the right of it: decency is out and dishonest dissembling is in in modern governance.
We may still be ahead of the game, here, but having changed our leaders, let's see what they can fix before we shoot them for trying.
