I had questions for Sen. Jack Reed, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Providence Mayor David Cicilline. At Sunday night’s Democratic state convention, I asked them.

I believe Reed showed a lack of leadership when he refused to endorse a presidential candidate until Sen. Barack Obama finally knocked Sen. Hillary Clinton out. What was that about? Reed said he wanted to nurture party unity and give everyone a fair chance to make his or her case.

Whom did he root for as he watched results of the almost weekly primaries and caucuses? He said he was impressed by the “amazing” skills displayed by the candidates. Fine, but, hey, when you watch the Red Sox and Yankees, you want one to win, no?

Reed wouldn’t bite. “This was more like an intra-squad scrimmage,” he said, adding, “The task now is to pull the team together.”

As for Whitehouse, my question was triggered by a report last week by the Senate intelligence committee, on which he serves. It debunked the Bush administration’s pre-war claims about the threat from Iraq; Whitehouse said Bush & Co. “misled this country into a war that never should have been fought.”

What I wondered was this: President Bill Clinton was impeached — deservedly so, I thought, but for far lesser offenses. Won’t future generations be puzzled as to how President Bush escaped impeachment for far worse offenses? How would Whitehouse explain this to them?

He said they should know that Dick Cheney also would have had to go, which would have made the process even more cumbersome. Overall, Whitehouse said, Mr. Bush presented a conundrum. “The wreck that he has made of the country from a policy point of view demands a lot of work in health care, intelligence, education and a lot of other places to kind of put things right again. And the urgency of that work is, unfortunately and sort of bizarrely, the best argument against impeaching those two, because it kind of brings everything to a complete stop.”

In other words, it was more important to deal with “what a bad president he was” than to impeach him for being “dishonest.”

As for Cicilline, I increasingly wonder if he really will decide to seek the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor. Last week, the mere mention of a possible Cicilline bid drew boos at a State House labor rally that included teachers and firefighters, two groups angry with him. How could anyone who evokes persistent union antipathy aspire to the Democratic nod?

Cicilline said that when he decides what to press for in labor matters, he doesn’t calculate how it would impact a run. He said voters would respect his efforts. “We have to, as Democrats, be able to ensure that our employees are well paid, get good benefits, have retirement security — and that it’s affordable to taxpayers … The Democratic Party, the party of working people, understands that, because that’s who’s paying the bills.”

Meanwhile, it can’t help Cicilline that his brother, John, has pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to shake down a drug-dealing couple and manipulate the criminal-justice system. It’s a sad situation. I don’t suggest anyone hold it against the mayor. But it could play into the view of some voters that Providence politics is a snake den.

Cicilline told me, “I am very, very confident that people who watch the work that I have done as mayor … will have no question that we have brought integrity and honesty to city government. I don’t think anything that has happened with my brother undermines that in any way.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com