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I always hesitate to post about big political events. Lord knows the blogosphere is beyond full with endless chatter, especially as the political season gets increasingly more contested. This morning I read one report that Hillary’s chances are getting slimmer, and then saw that she was decidedly ahead in a Gallup poll. I don’t know if I have the stamina for this rollercoaster…

I can’t go without a mention of Obama’s race speech, though. I mean… wow. I had to pause the YouTube to catch my breath after the “I can no more disown him” part.

I think Stanklin said it best, though, after he read the speech:

he’s truly brilliant. and brave. and not full of shit. i can only hope nothing ridiculous happens between now and november. this is an amazing man. I mean, america is stupid, but even stupid people must see what’s going on.

I told myself I wouldn’t be political again for a while, but there’s a crazy energy in the air on the eve of Super Tuesday, what with Obama’s recent surge in polling and will.i.am’s tune making the rounds. (My own musical contribution to the effort hasn’t received quite as many hits of yet, but hey, we all do what we can…)

I was again impressed with Hillary’s performance in the L.A. debate last Thursday, and constantly pinch myself with questions about the viability of “change” and “hope” in a pragmatic political forum. But it only took a few minutes of watching Carville & Matalin to remember the sickening irrelevancy of partisanship. If it’s naiveté, then hell, bring on naive governance!

For those who want to believe but are still on the fence, we return to George Packer’s recent article:

The next morning, Obama was scheduled to appear before an overflow crowd at the opera house in Lebanon. When he walked onto the stage, which was framed by giant vertical banners proclaiming “HOPE,” his liquid stride and handshake-hugs suggested a man completely at ease.

“I decided to run because of you,” he told the crowd. “I’m betting on you. I think the American people are honest and generous and less divided than our politics suggests.” He mocked the response to his campaign from “Washington,” which everyone in the room understood to be Clinton, who had warned in the debate two nights before against “false hopes”: “No, no, no! You can’t do that, you’re not allowed. Obama may be inspiring to you, but here’s the problem—Obama has not been in Washington enough. He needs to be stewed and seasoned a little more, we need to boil the hope out of him until he sounds like us—then he will be ready.”

The opera house exploded in laughter. “We love you,” a woman shouted.

“I love you back,” he said, feeding off the adoration that he had summoned without breaking a sweat. “This change thing is catching on, because everybody’s talking about change. ‘I’m for change.’ ‘Put me down for change.’ ‘I’m a change person, too.’ ”

It was the day before the primary, and Obama began to improvise a theme, almost too much in the manner of Martin Luther King: “In one day’s time.” It carried him through health care, schools, executive salaries, Iraq—everything that Clinton had invoked, except that this was music. Then came the peroration: “If you know who you are, who you’re fighting for, what your values are, you can afford to reach out to people across the aisle. If you start off with an agreeable manner, you might be able to pick off a few folks, recruit some independents into the fold, recruit even some Republicans into the fold. If you’ve got the votes, you will beat them and do it with a smile on your face.” It was a summons to reasonableness, yet Obama made it sound thrilling. “False hopes? There’s no such thing. This country was built on hope,” he cried. “We don’t need leaders to tell us what we can’t do—we need leaders to inspire us. Some are thinking about our constraints, and others are thinking about limitless possibility.” At times, Obama almost seems to be trying to escape history, presenting himself as the conduit through which people’s yearnings for national transformation can be realized.

Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days.

I know the passage above isn’t really an endorsement. But if people could care, if a smidgen of the rampant apathy was converted to productive involvement by speeches like the above, I believe the caring would be about actually getting things done and slowly fixing problems, instead of further entrenching the divisive notions of winning and losing. This isn’t a game.

So let Mary & James go share a coke while the people get back into the role of self-governance.

How’s that for naiveté?!

So, I open the paper this morning over my bowl of cereal and decaf Earl Grey tea, and what do i see? The New York Times has chosen to endorse Hillary Clinton. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, the board’s decision is partly based on their satisfaction with her job as their state’s senator. The piece, well-written and thoughtful, left me unsettled.

I have long been an Obama supporter. I have volunteered at his campaign headquarters. I have donated money to support his candidacy. But I am resistant to cults of personality, and as much as I have found him utterly inspiring and truly uniting, I remain cautious of yes-manship and quixotic political larks. And the Times basically draws the line, saying “sure, Obama’s great, but let’s get real….” In the end, they’re saying, Hillary’s the one who can actually get things done.

But here’s the thing: I support Obama because I view him as the pragmatic choice. In this week’s New Yorker, George Packer poses this very question of whether it’s more important for the commander-in-chief to win over the American people or know how to schmooze the Washington insiders. Both the Times and Packer position Clinton as the workhorse candidate who can actually broker legislation that, in the long run, will amount to “change”. And I don’t doubt Hillary’s shrewdness in negotiating across the aisle, even with her past enemies (a profile of her in The Atlantic last year left an eerie and indelible image of her communing with old stalwarts of the right in intimate, closed-door prayer groups).

The only reason I even latched on to Obama so many years ago (after reading a profile in, um, the NYer) was because I saw in him both a person authentic and open enough to inspire and unify a divided citizenry, and a politician smart enough, ambitious enough and savvy enough to sit in the smoky parlors with the politicos and get deals done. I think the answer to Packer’s question is that you need both; and I think Obama has the whole package.

Karen often rightly points out that on the nuances of many key issues we both tend to side with Senator Clinton’s policies. But I harbor no fantasies of a utopian progressive era. I just want to start to fix the things that are broken. Health care. Budget spending. Foreign policy. Education (well, maybe someday that will get back on the agenda…). It will be slow. It will be painful. It will take so much compromise it will often feel like we’re not moving forward. But I believe it will take a leader like Obama to get even that far.

I didn’t watch the Democratic Debate last night on CNN, but I did read a recap this morning, and it made me sad. Overt bitterness between candidates is nothing new, of course. But I feel angry with the Clintons for introducing the negative tone into the race, and I feel frustrated with Obama for failing to turn it to his advantage thus far.

If anything, Senator Clinton is benefiting from the nastiness at the moment, and not because Obama can’t dish it back. In fact, he’s quite good at this verbal sparring, but it’s unattractive on a candidate whose success is based on our willingness to engage in childlike hope about our country’s future. Meanwhile, it makes Clinton seem tenacious and smug. Maybe Joe Klein thinks that Bill is trying to sabotage her campaign, but right now it looks like tactical brilliance.