The one caveat is his tip toe to the dark side during the 2008 Presidential campaign when he let advisors doom him by abandoning some old positions to try to find more palatable stock Republican positions and his nomination of Sarah Palin with seemed to have unleashed an ugliness he always fought against.
But, both before and after that aberrational moment, he held up public service as an actual service to the public at large.
I might have disagreed with him often, but I rarely felt that he was representing anything but the public's best interest as he saw it. He was a rare bird on both sides of the aisle.