And when Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) became the first woman to have a real shot at the presidency over the last eighteen months, Morgan again fought courageously to expose the sexism Clinton faces down every day in the media, among politicians, and on the campaign trail. The first half of Morgan’s recent essay, “In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Goodbye to All That, Part II,” Morgan lists the damning evidence that shows feminism is still essential to all people who aspire to be part of a free culture. From South Park’s plotline featuring terrorists who put a bomb in HRC’s vagina to men chanting “Iron my shirt!” outside a rally to Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” Morgan says “goodbye” to all cultural and political hate against Clinton’s presidential run.

I thank her for this essential cultural service.

But Robin Morgan may well have fallen victim to her own anger and it has blinded her to what is happening in the nation. Her misreading is evident in her own clear prose. The result could be calamitous for Morgan’s future recruiting ability, either in presidential politics or other worthy causes that touch upon broad transformations in America. It is necessary, then, to find respectful ground, democratic ground, on which to stand on in order to hold accountable one’s cherished heroines.

So with some trepidation, but in tribute to the candor her own example nurtures in me, I seek to stand on that ground and respond to the last half of Morgan’s recent essay. Here, her critical eye turns from sexism in the wider culture to those women who support Obama. They support him, she thinks, because their male boyfriends and family members do. They support him, she states, because they’re fearful a strong woman is unelectable. They support him, she contends, because they “can’t identify with a woman candidate [who] is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power.” They support him because they are deluded that women are already free. Morgan quotes Harriet Tubman to make the last point: only if women know they are enslaved by a sexist society can they be guided to freedom from that slavery.

I am not deluded or fearful or trying to impress my man. I supported Obama before my partner, sons, father, or male colleagues did. Most of them were surprised that I didn’t support HRC, given my reputation within the family and community for speaking out for women’s rights. My uncle, whose affectionate if ironic term for me since college has been “the family femi-nazi,” could hardly believe his ears. How weird and sad that Morgan does not seem to believe hers either.

It is true – though not quite in the way Morgan intended – that I am skeptical, if not “afraid,” of yucky power. That is, I’m wary of the kind of power cultural commentator Starhawk called “power-over” rather than “power-to.” Power-over is hierarchical power, Bush-Cheney power, Lyndon Johnson power – it is power to put someone in their “place” through punishment: withholding a job, silencing a report, denying a raise, sending in the Marines. And I agree with Morgan, HRC does do a better job than Obama at wielding this kind of power: Power-as-domination.

Here’s the problem: sustainable democracies can’t run on this kind of power. Power-as-domination is the very fuel making possible sexism, racism, empire, ageism and oppression of every kind. Power-over knows no party affiliation: it appears to most Americans to be the coin of the political realm.

In contrast, the concept of “power-to” is less familiar in the West. It is a kind of power best been represented worldwide by people like Gandhi, Wangari Maathai and the Dalai Lama, (and is actually gaining a measure of currency among some American business management elites). In the American freedom struggle, women like Diane Nash, Casey Hayden, and Ella Baker helped make it visible throughout the South and eventually throughout the nation. “It is the power that comes from within,” writes Starhawk. “Our ability to dare, to do, and to dream; our creativity. Power from within is unlimited. If I have the power to write, it doesn’t diminish your power: in fact, my writing might inspire you or illuminate your thinking.”[1] This is the kind of power Obama invoked with his first stump speech: that “yes we can” reach for a better world that stretched the Founders, and the abolitionists, and the populists, and the pioneer industrial unionists, and those who sat-in at the lunch counters in 1960. Obama not only surpasses Clinton in his mastery of this kind of power, Clinton has never advanced it, much less mobilized others to act on it.

Nowhere is this more evident in the way they have conducted themselves on the campaign trail. Clinton will stop at nothing to win. Any tactic is permissible as long as it gets her to her goal: the presidency. Obama insists that the means must be consistent with the ends: he does not feel his kind of politics can prevail unless the process itself is clean.

And this is where I part ways with Morgan. I don’t support Obama because he’s black and racism is the country’s original sin, or because I’m fearful of going against my men folk, nor do I support Clinton because I’m female and feel HRC can better fight for my needs.

I’m voting for political substance over political identity.

The substance: I want a President who uses power democratically, not to dominate. So how does power-to work? This seems to be something that Obama himself has trouble describing, despite the fact that he is the most talented national communicator since FDR. It is people-power, the power to bring people together, listen to their goals and dreams, and then organize them to work toward those goals. Obama describes his apprenticeship in learning how to wield this kind of power as a community organizer in Dreams from My Father. Ironically, the skills required of community organizers often overlap with the culturally-sanctioned training of females: warmth, empathy, compassion, and above all, a singular ability to listen. Community organizers figure out what the community wants, and then help people stand up and act in public for their goals. Obama combines this with another trait common to community organizers: speaking truth to power. Clinton says she will get up every morning and work hard for the American people. I don’t doubt she would. The difference is, I don’t want someone working for me. I like the accountability Obama’s vision brings: he wants to work with us, not for us.

It’s all about listening. Though I’m freighting that term with something more than what’s ordinarily invoked by the word. I mean the kind of listening done by the Dalai Lama, by Ella Baker: it includes opening oneself up to the views of others in order to expand one’s capacity to see things from another perspective. It means opening oneself up to doubt and questioning one’s own thinking. Listening becomes an inherently communal act, drawing on the certainty that everyone – from Pat Buchanan to Sista Souljah, from Milton Friedman to Jim Hightower – has something to contribute to the civic conversation.

But you cannot hear people if you condescend to them, if you think you know better than them what they need. This kind of condescension from the nation’s politicians, intellectuals, and journalists defines nearly the entire range of civic conversation, marking attitudes from right to left throughout the twentieth century, from FDR, Roy Wilkins and JFK to Nixon, James Baker, Donald Rumsfeld and yes, the controlling condescension can be seen in Hillary Clinton. Simply put, HRC can’t hear from most of us because she condescends to us. She can’t imagine that ordinary every-day people are as important to solving critical societal issues as are political elites. She doesn’t believe that people-power is as potent as power-over.

Morgan tells us HRC is more qualified. Again, if one is looking at her ability to wield power-over, I believe Morgan is correct. But the future of the Democratic Party is not in power-over, but in power-to. Morgan claims HRC has better connections and funding and party-building background, ones that she notes “Obama was awfully glad about when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.” In this, Morgan is mistaken. While Clinton undoubtedly had the initial advantage (say, up through mid-2007) in fund-raising, DNC connections, and ward-level machinery, it’s increasingly clear that in all three areas Obama has recruited thousands of party functionaries to his vision of power-to. These include party veterans tired of Senator Clinton’s bag-o-dirty tricks (Bill Richardson, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter) and idealists – young and old alike — who believe that this country can still fulfill its mission of “government by and for the people.” Obama’s vision has resulted in the most effective and lucrative direct-contribution campaign since the mail-ins of the Religious Right in the 1980s. He has done a superb job – a job superior to Clinton – of raising funds from the average American, and in so doing has largely liberated himself from corporate influence.

Let me be clear: Clinton plays by rules I won’t play by. She wants to beat Karl Rove at his own game, and thinks that when she does, that is feminism. She presents herself as a “kill or be killed” kind of feminist who will fight for what she believes in even if she has to use unprincipled methods to get there. To this end, she isn’t democratic, even though she supports goals (universal health care, fairer tax policy, child care supports, educational improvement) that are necessary building blocks for a more democratic society.

Morgan says “goodbye to turning [Obama] into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?” Morgan here seems blind to the difference between power-over and power-to as well: she still comes down with this "idealistic but misguided" line on Obama that is inherently pro-status quo. This is the politics of power-over in action. Where, after all, did Obama get the ideas in his speeches? Ted Sorenson? The Kennedys? Charisma? No. His ideas have matured over a long period of time, and yet are remarkably consistent. He has spoken the same language since his 20s. His vantage point is hard-earned experience: power-to works better than power-over.

Feminism’s genius is to liberate people – and the culture at large – from all gender stereotypes. And that brings me to one more harsh power-over chord that Morgan surely did not intend to strike. The baby boomer women Morgan and the feminist movement propelled upward in the 1970s are now in positions of authority in the academy, in business, in law, in medicine. They may not be at the very top, but they often end up supervising 20- and 30-year old women of my own generation. They serve on our dissertation or tenure committees, they vote for the new law partners, they decide on promotions, they help pick who will be chief resident. For me, these women have been fabulous: role models who support, nurture, mentor and advise. I’ve been so lucky to work with women like this, and could not have developed as an historian without them. And I think this is the general rule for women in the workplace. But as others of us can testify, a good third of these baby boomer women wield their “feminism” like a Neanderthal’s club. If you won’t subscribe to their brand of feminism (working full-time instead of 40%, having children only after you get to partner or tenure, traveling on the same schedule as the men in the firm), you can kiss their support goodbye. They hold back their vote, deny your promotion, reassign your patients. It’s the kind of “goodbye” that the second half of Morgan’s essay too easily and eerily echoes. It’s the same kind of power that Clinton wields – power-over rather than power-to. So when Morgan says she’s not voting for Hillary because Clinton is a woman, but because Morgan is a woman, it leaves plenty of us cold. And somehow, Morgan claims that Clinton is more practical and “to the left of” Obama. Too many of us have had too many experiences where the foot on our neck has been that of a self-described feminist for this to resonate.

Morgan concludes by saying “Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.” She says “goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves? ‘Our President, Ourselves!’”

I think the question must be respectfully but directly raised: Who is “we women,” Ms. Morgan? Hillary isn’t representing me. She isn’t interested in my voice. She thinks she knows what I need, and thinks she knows better than others how to get it for me.

Despite my firm belief that Obama represents a renewal of the democratic promise, and Clinton represents not only the policies but also the processes of the past, I agree with Morgan that Clinton could be a good U.S. president. Obama, however, with his 21st century vision of power-to, would make a better President. Not because he’s a man. In fact, it might be in spite of the fact that he’s been raised to manhood in this culture. Rather than tell me to shut up and listen to elders who know better, who’ve fought longer, who “really know the score,” he invites me into the national conversation, and makes a seat at the table for me. It’s a seat with real power, not a seat in Clinton’s photo-op.

Notes

1 Starhawk, Web of Power, 7-8.

Improbably? For sure. Persuasively? The self-regarding shout-out that turned Hillary into a Poster Woman for voters with broken teeth went over my head since I’d just read an analysis of her head-of-the-class consciousness in Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary Clinton (which has takes on her by thirty women writers). The author, Susan Lehman, explained how Hillary spent the formative years of her working life as a corporate lawyer with the powerful Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Hillary’s time there seems to have shaped her way of being in (and above) this world. Lehman tells a story about one of Hillary’s (few) trial appearances that takes on new resonance as she tries to hold on in Pennsylvania with prole-ier-than-thou poses (even as Bruce Springsteen endorses Obama).

ACORN, a community organizing group working on behalf of the poor had helped pass a local ballot initiative that gave low-income residents a break in heating bills and increased rates for businesses. Looking to put a quick stop to this handout, the business community called upon its lawyers at the Rose Law Firm and asked them to defeat the ordinance in court.

Hillary soon found herself battling ACORN’s attorney – and her close friend – Wade Rathke, in court. Deftly marshalling constitutional theory, she convinced the judge that the ordinance constituted unlawful taking of property. Wade Rathke never spoke to Hillary again. For Hillary, the matter seemed entirely impersonal. She maintains strong contacts with ACORN and works with them today on minimum wage and electoral reform…She defeated a friend in Court. That’s business. That’s what lawyers do.

Bottom lines trump bottom dogs in Hillary’s world. And who can really blame her? The Age of Reagan isn’t dead. It’s not even past so what’s solidarity? In its absence, Hillary’s sense of professionalism has its own thin appeal. Especially to women voters who’ve known from boss-men who coast while their female subordinates do it all.

Clinton has displayed a sort of labor-intensive skill as she grinds along on the campaign trail or in the debates. (And she gets extra Brownie points for diligence right now.) But Hillary has ceded the “vision thing” to the other guy. Politics for her comes down to technics, an authentic commitment to feminist identity politics and her own personal trials. Obama, on the other hand, can’t stop seeing the world through the eyes of others.

Take that moment near the end of his speech on the night of the Ohio and Texas primaries when he asked Americans to see their country – and this campaign – from the point of view of someone (a relative of one of his campaign staffers) living in Uganda:

He is 81 years old and has never experienced true democracy in his lifetime. During the reign of Idi Amin, he was literally hunted and the only reason he escaped was thanks to the kindness of others and a few good-sized trunks. And on the night of the Iowa caucuses, that 81-year-old man stayed up until five in the morning, huddled by his television, waiting for the results.

The world is watching what we do here…

Can we lead the community of nations in taking on the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and climate change; genocide and disease?

Can we send a message to all those weary travelers beyond our shores who long to be free from fear and want that the United States of America is, and always will be, ‘the last best, hope of Earth?’

I thought Obama’s angle of vision was too far Out that night, but maybe I’m misunderestimating Americans. They might just recognize this globalizing, post-Evil Empire world needs an American leader who means to refine and amp up Bush’s democracy promotion agenda, not deep-six it. Obama has a lot in common with John McCain on this score. And there are other commonalities too as I found out when I checked McCain’s most recent book on “the art of great decisions,” Hard Call. It repeatedly returns to key moments in American struggles against slavery and segregation. Proud to belong to the Party of Lincoln, McCain’s instincts seem to distance him from the GOP’s Southern Strategists. (Though he got into bed with them when he signed off on his wife’s gotcha response to Michelle Obama’s expressions of ambivalence toward America.)

While I believe McCain realizes white folks don’t really have the standing to tell African-Americans what to feel on the 4th of the July, his understanding of the American Dilemma pales when compared to Obama’s. Whenever MCain takes on the issue in Hard Call, the moral leaders he cites are white men. Hard Call features a parade of worthies including Lincoln and Robert Shaw – the Civil War officer who became a martyr leading a charge by his African-American regiment on a Confederate fort – and Harry Truman and Felix Frankfurter and Branch Rickey. (Jackie Robinson gets some play in the Rickey chapter, but the General Manager is presented as the idea man with the plan to integrate the Major Leagues.) McCain and his collaborators never try to derive lessons in leadership from the example of a black person engaged in the struggle for racial equality. Their blankness here probably says something about how difficult it is for top-downers like McCain (or Hillary) to get their minds around the Civil Rights Movement, which was based not so much on executive decisions but on numberless “hard calls” by everyday people.

Obama’s mind, though, is Movement-made. That’s why he keeps underscoring that his campaign is not all about him. And, in this media-driven age, you can catch glimpses on CNN of how his campaign empowers African-Americans (and forces them to prove it all night). Over the past months, that network has looked to black commentators for sound-bites. Two of these “analysts” – Jamal Simmons and Roland Martin – have distinguished themselves as canny (though not tendentious) defenders of Obama. Martin is a speed-talker who discombobulates Lou Dobbs and sundry shills recruited by that demi-demagogue. Simmons has faced even harder tests. Aware he’s on the spot in a hot medium, he plays it cool, calm and collected. Yet, on the night of the Texas primary, the Clintons’ lawyer Lanny Davis accused Simmons of being “angry.” Stunned, Simmons burned for a half-second, before getting back in the game. When Davis tried the same trick a couple days later – this time, accusing Obama of sounding “angry,” Simmons breezed past him without hinting at his own frustration at the Clinton man’s repeated efforts to conger up the specter of “Black Rage.”

Sean Wilentz recently wrote a long piece in the New Republic and a shorter one in the Philadelphia Inquirer absolving the Clinton campaign of playing race cards and attacking the Obama campaign for whipping up controversies on this front immediately before and after the South Carolina primary. Wilentz might have scored important points if he’d been content to complain that Obama’s campaign had fallen into p.c. mode on occasion, but his pieces amounted to propaganda because he left out any fact that complicated his case for the Clintons’ magnanimity. In the New Republic piece, for example, which purported to offer a comprehensive account of race-based tensions between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, Wilentz passed right over the ugly turns during the run-up to the Carolina primary after one of Hillary’s prominent black supporters – Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment (BET) – insinuated Obama had been cracking up in the 80’s. Johnson dove into the gutter as he was introducing Hillary at an event and defending her remark that the Civil Rights Movement required “a president to get it done.” (i.e. LBJ.) With friends like Robert Johnson, it’s impossible to argue the Clinton campaign has never played dirty. Especially since the Clinton campaign put out a statement denying Johnson meant to defame Obama and submitting that he had only meant to drive home the contrast between Obama's work as a local community organizer with the Clintons’ grander achievements. The campaign stuck with that story until it became apparent that no-one would buy it. (Johnson himself eventually apologized.) When Bill Clinton trashed Obama as a fantast a few days on, his attack was freighted with extra baggage because Hillary had just got over spinning Johnson’s line on Obama’s high times in the ‘hood into that other (less scurrilous but still trivializing) version of her opponent’s experience as an organizer.

Down with Hillary’s “realist” approach to American politics, Wilentz asserted that no-one could have a second thought about Hillary’s claim that LBJ was the indispensable man for the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a no-brainer to him. He’s certainly right when he underscores LBJ’s crucial role in getting legislation passed, but anyone aware of what happened to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the 1964 Convention knows LBJ’s Democratic Party was not the Dream Team to African Americans from the Movement’s creative margins. Bob Moses – the legendary SNCC organizer – once suggested politics in the 60’s went sour after LBJ’s arrogant (and back-stabbing) Party power-mongers displayed their contempt for the grassrootsy MFDP at the ‘64 Convention. Wilentz (unintentionally) brought back the history of bad blood between Party regulars and the Movement’s “local people” when he cited Bill Moyers as the final authority on LBJ’s Civil Rights legacy in his New Republic piece. A couple years ago, when reading in Nick Kotz’s book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America, I was startled to find out LBJ had given Moyers and older Texas pol Walter Jenkins the task of spying on every move made during the 64 Convention by MFDP delegates. When the regular Mississippi delegation walked out because they wouldn’t accept the compromise that required them to give up 2 of their 30 plus seats, Moyers was outraged that MFPD delegates (led by Bob Moses) slipped on to the Convention floor to take chairs vacated by the regulars. Moyers proposed to have Security Guards throw MFDP delegates out of the hall. (Walter Jenkins, though, had the sense to suggest that it might not look good to have black folks assaulted for trying to take part in a democratic process white folks had disdained.)

I doubt Wilentz knows of this bit-part in Moyers’ past. And, even if he did, he's not about to cotton on to my sense there's a striking convergence between Moyers’ (and LBJ's) scorn for the MFPD’s boldness in 1964 and the Clinton campaign’s contempt for the “audacity of hope” in our time. While that connection might be the sort of stretch that a “real” historian like Wilentz should handle skeptically, his own interpretation of this campaign indicates he ain’t trying to hear tonal matters objectively. He might have been able to offer a more convincing defense of the Clintons if he’d placed the friction that arose between them and African-Americans in a larger historical context, rather than asserting the Obama campaign manufactured all the tension.

In email exchanges with me Wilentz insisted the sequence of events after Robert Johnson’s dis signified zip. (He’d missed other incidents I cited though he graciously encouraged me to send him any available YouTube clips of Lanny Davis’s CNN provocations.) Wilentz claimed to be “willing to have his mind changed.” But his treatment of Obama’s great speech-act on behalf of a “More Perfect Union” in his Philadelphia Inquirer op ed makes me wonder if anything or anyone could get through to him. Ignoring all the evidence of Obama’s capacity for forbearance (as well as his deep understanding of America’s original sin), Wilentz invoked the speech only to cite signs of Obama’s (supposed) readiness to play the “race-baiters card.” Wilentz heard nothing but a speaker “pressing the attack by three times likening Ferraro to Rev. Wright.”

Wilentz is a Clinton partisan and I suppose that accounts for his ear. Still, he’s a distinguished American historian; it’s shocking to see him come up so small in the wake of Obama’s momentous attempt to cultivate a national audience’s historical imagination.

There have been other nasty surprises on this front. Obama’s speech moved the screenwriter/blogger Roger L. Simon to “poesy” for the first time since he was in high school. His polemical “Barack I Didn’t Do It For This: An homage to Andrew Goodman” opened as follows:

Barack, I was a civil rights worker… South Carolina, 1966… 22 yrs old … helping old folks register to vote, teaching kids to read and write, directing Raisin in the Sun…

Barack, I didn’t do it for this.

Barack, I dream of my kindergarten best friend Andy from Walden School, Manhattan, born one day after me, shot dead in Mississippi 1964.

Barack, I idolized Stokley Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Barack, I lost the full use of my left hand for life in South Carolina.

Barack, I didn’t do it for this.

Barack, I gave hundreds to the Black Panthers for their children’s breakfast program when I was 25 and a young screenwriter in Echo Park, Los Angeles, even though I knew Huey was crazy and was worried my money might have been going for guns, even though I had my own children in the house when the Panthers came over, their jackets bulging.

Barack, I made excuses for the Black Power Movement even though I knew it was turning racist.

Barack, I didn’t do it for this.

Barack, your speech was bullshit.

Simon’s wounds must be real. I’ll grant he has much more moral authority than me to b.s. about Obama’s speech. Yet his readiness to call attention to his own sacrifices (and put a lien on the martyrdom of his childhood friend) reminds me of how rarely vets of the Civil Rights Movement remember their own suffering and heroism “with advantages” (an indulgence Shakespeare allowed to war heroes). In my experience, non-violent soldiers in the Southern Freedom Movement tend to recall not what they did for black folks, but what they got back. Simon, though, was certainly right to connect Obama’s speech with the Movement. I believe it fit into that tradition as this passage from Wesley Hogan’s recent history of SNNC suggests:

One of the great strengths of the civil rights movement had been the utter unpredictability that grew out of its experimental approach to inherited tradition. Within SNCC, this presence necessarily depended upon a genuine tolerance of error. Indeed, it was SNCC's faith in the lessons derived from experience (from failure), its seemingly effortless capacity for improvisation, that most dramatically stamped its style and also its appeal. If SNCC had anything to say about it, the new desegregated America would be generous.

Recall that Obama improvised his way around his initial, less than inspired, take(s) on the Wright controversy until he got it all right. And recall how he reached out generously in his speech not just to Wright, but to Geraldine Ferraro, feminists (like Hillary Clinton) trying to “break the glass ceiling” and Angry White Men (and Women) who…

don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Talking straight to Reagan democrats, Obama comprehended their, ah, bitterness without bowing down to it. In the wake of his speech, though, there were commentators who meant to keep those fires of resentment burning. An Obama backer blogged at Daily Kos about an exchange he heard on a right-wing radio talk show:

Host: “He blamed Whitey!”
Caller: “He stated a fact.”
Host: “That's blaming Whitey!”

But this blogger was (rightly) more amazed when he listened to a Hillary supporter who was the guest host on a local show where the blogger “pushed buttons” as a sound engineer. While he’d expected Hillary’s fan would “parse Obama’s speech and look for in’s to attack,” he was stunned when the host – a newspaper columnist and self-described “progressive” – made common cause with angry conservative callers, asserting “after that speech I might have to vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination.”

During the first break, I said to him, "You know that if, God forbid, somehow Hillary gets the nomination, your allies-of-convenience, the Republicans, aren't going to be your allies anymore. They'll turn on you like the milk you left out overnight. You know that, don't you?"

He just laughed.

Hillary’s cynical supporter left our blogger shaking with anger but he had something fresh in his mind to ease his way forward. Earlier in the day, he’d received an email from an old friend – a hardcore conservative and lifelong Republican – with whom he’d been arguing politics for years though “the intersection of our social and political views basically begins and ends with gun rights…”

Or at least that was what I thought until yesterday, after Barack Obama's speech.

At 11:32, I received an email from Walker. There was no text in the body other than his signature. But the subject line said it all:

"Your man kicked ass today!"

That was it. And that was enough. I grinned so hard I thought my smile was going to meet together in the back of my head and drop the top of it off. This was my reply, short but sweet: “Yes, he did.”

The Kos blogger went on to quote his friend’s “unbelievable” follow-up email in which this once-conservative Republican distanced himself from right-wing tv and radio commentators:

“I heard the same thing from Rush on the way home, he was babbling on about being a individual and how he didn't like to be bunched with a lot of other people. The more I listen to that man, the more I think he is just pandering to the poor slobs that believe he is on their side, when actually he is on the side of the very rich and couldn't care less if people get ahead. Once again it's like it was a hundred years ago when the rich stood on the backs of the working man… I was watching Cavuto and he had Ben Stein on and he was saying it would be a good idea to raise the taxes on the rich, they have it and all they do is play golf all day and probably wouldn't even miss the money. Cavuto nearly had a bird, he was just flabbergasted, then a couple weeks later there is Ben Stein on Beck after writing a piece in a major paper saying the oil companies deserve a pat on the back for doing such a great job fueling our country.

someone got to him big time - he was probably threatened that he would never work again, and never be asked back on Cavuto, it was a radical turnaround.. When is the common man gonna realize that the media isn't telling and won't tell the truth or kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Something is definitely rotten and starting to smell in the media.”

Wow. Just...wow

I don’t doubt this blogger’s tales. But there’s a danger in pumping up the Obama effect. He may be a Black Swan but he isn’t a Messiah whose words and/or presence are fated to trigger revelations. In my own recent experience trying to talk up his candidacy to right-wingers who post at a website called The Belmont Club, movements of mind in Obama’s direction tend to go slower than one might expect based on the Daily Kos guy’s Good News. And what’s more, the “progress” I’ve witnessed tends to depend on allowances that “our” side – like all sides – is imperfect. I’ve become particularly mindful of that since I began calling and responding at The Belmont Club. The second part of this piece will focus on what I’ve learned from blogging there and I’ll close out this opening section with a passage I posted at the Club a day or two after the Rev. Wright story broke. While there’s nothing all that insightful about the words I wrote the weekend before Obama’s speech pointed Americans toward a More Perfect Union, perhaps they’re worth recalling just because they were dashed off in (the middle of) the moment. I’ll leave it to you to decide if they lived up to the Club’s own subtitle, “History and History in the Making:”

My African-American 4-year old will grow up loving America (if I have anything to do with it). At some point, though, I'll have to ease him into the shameful sides of our common past. Can't pretend I'm looking forward to getting all up in the founder's, ah, follies with slavery. Or the various prevarications of my people through the American centuries. I know the truth will set us all free...But if anyone has a good idea about how to approach American history w/o disillusioning a young African American – tell me – I'll need all the help I can get.

As you may be able to imagine, I was kinda hoping O. would give me an assist here in upcoming years!! But I can't pretend he was good enough tonight. Not upfront in his interview with Anderson Cooper. Too many excuses. He should talk straighter re Wright's Afro-centrism. Say it's not his pov but he understands where Wright is coming from and why that defensiveness is necessary for some folks in his community.

Afro-centric Christers have invented a way to handle race-based rage/frustration that won't kill anyone. (You know how many brothers die of high blood pressure!!) O needed to provide more explanations – less talk re his minister "retiring"...

Obama also made the past sound – slavery, Jim Crow, segregation – TOO far gone. He did better in that speech at MLK's Church – I think this whole thing should give him an opportunity to dig into the subject of race –Time for him to do some more close imagining. He needs to PUSH the Wrights of the world to think harder about where we're at. Just as he needs to push white folks to face up to the weight of the past in the present. I think he's up to it but we'll see...

Yes we can.

This is the first of a two part article. The second section will be published next month.

It takes an extraordinary faith in Barack Obama to believe, in early April of 2008, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president is somehow doomed. We can recite primary results and rattle off probable scenarios all we like, but the truth is that the media are running this show. No idiocy should be deemed impossible.

Four years ago, the young, idealistic Left flipped for Howard Dean—and then he flipped, so they really flipped, and filled the internet with techno remixes of his Scream. He went from our nation’s potential healer to howling mental patient, before he even had time to catch his breath. His supporters’ wide-eyed admiration turned seamlessly to hilarious disdain, almost as if the change had been orchestrated by an expert DJ.

Puff-up-and-puncture: It’s a trick the media excel at when it comes to Left candidates. I am not claiming that there’s a conscious conspiracy here, just trying to trace some inevitabilities of capitalism. The end of the Hollywood writers’ strike did little to end early-’08 Obamania. The media practically willed the backlash into being by prematurely accepting Obama as the “presumptive nominee” while hailing him in absolutely hysterical terms. Then they lurched in the opposite direction, ostensibly in response to overwhelming popular demand. As of this writing, media pros can say they’re doing the people’s will when they dig up dirt on Obama.

Some words now on the dirt that stuck: No one who has spent a considerable amount of time in any humanities department at a private university in the U.S. has any right to dis Jeremiah Wright. At his worst, he only states more concisely, if less politely, than most the fundamental principles of the academic Left. No professor at NYU, though, got my gooseflesh rising as Wright did when I watched on YouTube the famous Christmas sermon where he rails at “a country, and a culture, controlled by RICH WHITE PEOPLE!” Some media folk have defended Wright by praising only the part of him that would seem to overlap with Chomsky. The plain truth in that sermon goes unsung.

I didn’t vote for Obama over Hillary when I had the chance, and I’m more cautious than some people I know about making more of the man than his achievements appear to warrant. But I feel that Obama’s March 18 speech was a great Improbable Moment in American political culture. It could easily have gone a different way. Obama had a Scylla: the Dean Scream, a loud self-loving flameout, and he had a Charybdis: Bill Clinton, Sister Souljah, ‘92. He not only avoided both, but he also—finally!—used the moment as a mirror and held it up to some of Rev. Wright’s rich white people.

Make no mistake: The Speech was primarily aimed at the media. Look at the language: “We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.” Seen up close, the word choice is odd. “We can play”: Well, no, “we” can’t. We can’t control what is played on national news broadcasts, and neither can Obama. Here he’s addressing those who do make those decisions, drawing them close with a first-person plural so he doesn’t have to shout as Howard Dean did. If Obama’s guess is right and these folks still have some normal human susceptibility to shame, they might not even realize that they’ve been humbled until his words have done their work.

Even among Obama’s supporters and advisors, there is insufficient understanding of how radical this “we” can be. Empathy, when it’s real, isn’t far from epiphany. There should be a shock of recognition in it that gives it a kick. Identity politics as it’s understood in contemporary American media/academia, however, is practiced from behind the mirror. From that privileged position, the “smart” set delivers its judgments on fairness, history, and social justice. Obama’s speech probably could have done more to underscore the political sophistication of the unprivileged…but if the last 50 years (at least) of pop music hasn’t demonstrated that, then what will?

One line in the speech in particular got to me: “Your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams.” Democracy’s contradictions made Dean flip out and Kerry flip-flop, but Obama seems to quaff them. He drinks them in so deep, they’re even in his dreams. I wouldn’t classify what I’ve got as “Obama fever,” exactly, but I’m more than a little hopeful that we’re witnessing the beginning of a new phase of identity politics, one that dispenses with the pseudo-scholarly shibboleths in favor of the following principle:

Either everyone’s pain matters to you, or no one’s does.

Each song on Magic feels like a compacted version of The Rising; the tunes assess circumstances and characters that Springsteen has observed in the malaise that followed 9/11 and those concerns have been sharpened by focus on the Iraq War. Great thing about Magic is that it isn’t an anti-war screed. Springsteen conveys a sense of the war (always looking at it from the sidelines) by evoking everyday attitudes of people who live with consciousness of the war. But it doesn’t fumble the Iraq War like a political football; it evinces the war as part of social habit, within the context of private lives and the difficulty of loving and holding on to faith. The term “magic” suitably stands in for both those phenomena; it may especially be Springsteen’s attempt at slipping the questions recently raised by conservative fundamentalism. Yet, strangely — movingly — Magic contains a verifiable sense of Catholic resolve. Religion remains a crucial part of the American experience though it may not be popular among secular Leftists; it helps define America’s sense of itself and of its history. Besides providing powerful metaphors for struggle, passion, obligation, desire, fear, religion helps to contextualize and understand those things. The song “Devil’s Arcade” becomes both a war metaphor and an allusion to the perplexing aspects of loving; the fearsome, unpredictable nature of intimacy.

This sensitivity makes Magic the most compelling album Springsteen has made in years. It harkens to the disillusionment of Tunnel of Love as well as his ambivalent romanticism and hard luck — the constant, moving themes of The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born to Run. In Magic, Springsteen perfects and simpifies his way of expressing these concerns; he matches the most extraordinary pop expressions of contemporary mood and richly accounts for Iraq War malaise and everyday 21st Century tragedy. A line in “Devil’s Arcade” becomes trenchant allusion for weariness that enacts the ennui of both war and peace-time: “You sleep and you dream of your buddies Charlie and Jim/And wake with a thick desert dust on your skin.” Here, Springsteen surpasses the fashionable sadness of the pop group Arcade Fire (Springsteen clones) and evokes the profound moodiness of Morrissey’s English miserablist songs, particularly Morrissey’s great “Everyday Is Like Sunday” (1988) with its refrain “Trudging back over pebbles and sand/ And a strange dust lands on your hands/and on your face.”

Springsteen references Morrissey — the most significant pop mood-setter of the past 20 years — just as Morrissey’s song borrows mood and imagery from British poet John Betjeman’s “Slough” (“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough” led to Morrissey’s “This is the coastal town/That they forgot to bomb/Come, come nuclear bomb.”) Morrissey’s depressed wish for Armageddon parallels the nihilism that Springsteen finds in the contemporary American condition — caused by war but also by Morrisseyean facts of modern, dissatisfied life. Springsteen’s “thick desert dust” sounds specific but it resonates profoundly, as does Morrissey’s “strange dust,” with suggestions of aridity, ruin and the grave. (Note: Morrissey is NOT a nihilist; sadness opens the door of his deep compassionate insight.)

Morrissey’s impact is felt most remarkably in Magic on Springsteen’s “The Girls in the Their Summer Clothes,” his masterly recapitulation of Born to Run-era drama, with vernacular and place descriptions that recall “Jungleland.” But “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” — my favorite track on the album — has an extraordinary wistfulness not heard in any pop record since “Everyday Is Like Sunday.” The same secular sadness that Morrissey alludes to as a day without mass or communal congregation is present in Springsteen’s vision of a community coping with existential gloom and regret. As the song’s characters make their way through a working-class landscape, the artist sympathizes with their anomie and his awareness confers a grace upon their activities (daily habits and secular rituals). Where Morrissey internalized this mood, and left grace up to the plangent surge of the music and his own plaintive singing, Springsteen goes after a populist, almost convivial tone. While Morrissey dares to beckon Armageddon as a social and spiritual critique, Springsteen creates a longing for forgiveness.

Each stanza in the song is sung at a measured pace, making lyrical the daily American occurrences that Springsteen observes. The details are writerly (“Kid’s rubber ball smacks against…bicycle spokes spin round”) but most importantly, they’re lifted from common experience and chosen to signify innocuous life phases, if not innocence itself. These verses prove Springsteen is the kind of common-man’s romantic whose sense of the present insists upon the kind of time-sensitive compassion that’s wrapped up with a sense of nostalgia. It’s in the song’s place names: Blessing Street, Magic Street. And character names: waitress Sheniqua pouring coffee for “my poor Bill.” (Was Springsteen conscious of evoking the great torch song “Bill” from the 1920s Kern-Hammerstein musical Showboat? — perhaps the greatest example of showbiz Americana. Interestingly, it was sung by the musical’s biracial tragedienne, Julie, while Springsteen’s waitress represents the first black female character in his songbook cosmology. The name Bill has contemporary white connotations which adds to the poignancy of the café scene, making it a peaceable moment of social integration.) Here, the descending key change of his vocals — simultaneous with the band’s crescendo — identifies personal anxiety and spiritual yearning (“Things get a little tight, but I know they’re gonna turn my way”). Breathtakingly, the private and political are presented in musical counterpoint.

Springsteen doesn’t sing about a perfect society on Magic. He’s learned since 9/11 that an ideal society is something you work toward (Utopia); it’s also an idea that must be rectified in relation to the reality one knows. That’s also a crucial contemporary theme, recently expressed by both Morrissey and Spielberg. These artists’ viewpoints come together strikingly in an image from “Your Own Worst Enemy.” It’s a great warning song — warning against the blame reflex that’s become so common since the 2004 election. Springsteen reminds us of our own fallibility; that our propensity to dream can isolate us as well as keep us from recognizing our best course of behavior. Thus, consumerist habit comes under scrutiny in the line “There’s a face you know/Stand back from the shop window.”

That image immediately reminded me of the remarkable moment in Spielberg’s Munich where Avner is taunted by his French informant that the killing cycle isn’t over yet. Homebody and chef Avner has been staring in a shop window at a sparkling new kitchen design when he’s given this dreadful challenge and the reflection of his new killer’s face is superimposed over objects of his former homelife identity He struggles with the realization of the peace he’ll never have and Spielberg shows us one of the costs of political warfare by the implicit idea of Avner selling his soul for “peace.”

Morrissey also faces the music in last year’s complex “On the Streets I Ran” — an extraordinary song looking back at the hell of growing up in a violent, aggressive neighborhood and trying to rise above that history. He begins “Ooooo/ A working-class face glares back at me from the glass and lurches/ Ohhh.” Springsteen never sings about this kind of revulsion, at least not from Morrissey’s pained perspective. Springsteen’s more forgiving, but he’s also conscious of social antagonism that (in Morrissey’s plaint) grounds down individuals who must go it alone. Morrissey’s rejoinder, “Dear God, when will I be where I should be?” is a question Springsteen asks implicitly. It’s also the idea behind “Your Own Worst Enemy’s” closing lyric “The flag you flew so high/ It drifted into the sky” — an image of American promise tied up with patriotism and a sense of class and neighborhood that we all feel whatever our various experiences and temperaments. There are private, isolated dreams that slip away from the real world we inhabit. (This is true for you and me and George Bush, too, which makes the Rolling Stone magazine review of Magic infuriating in the way it reduced the album to an attack on Bush. Did that reviewer really listen to “Your Own Worst Enemy”?!!)

Neighborhood, home-town experience is vividly evoked throughout Magic, similar to the manifestations of place and home in Spielberg’s earlier movies. But it is nowhere better expressed than in “Long Walk Home” where the Morrisseyean wistfulness is once again evoked:

Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again

It’s as desirous as the image of girls in their summer dresses, as nostalgic as the communal images in the old Fun with Dick and Jane readers used to indoctrinate the Boomer generation. But Springsteen’s intention is to hone that longing into canny political awakening. The song’s already-classic lyric, quoted by so many reviewers is, I fear, misunderstood unless it is heard with Morrissey’s ironic skepticism.

My father said
Son, you’re lucky in this town
It’s a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you
Nobody goes it alone
You know that flag flying over the courthouse
It means certain things are set in stone
Who we are and what we’ll do and what we won’t

To me this song rhapsodizes about the need to return to old values and beliefs — the long (impossible) walk back to innocence. It’s almost shocking that so many reviewers willfully misread it (Ronald Reagan “Born in the U.S.A.”-style), as a Kiwanis Club booster song. Rather, it’s from the point of view of a disillusioned veteran who doesn’t see America or American ideology the same way anymore. His father’s advice is heartbreakingly wrong — or at least disproved. That the things we were formerly told were facts — the ideology we were hopefully encouraged to believe — no longer hold true makes the song devastating.

That psychic alienation is apparent in the vet’s tour of his town square and his peek inside a barbershop: “I look in their faces, they’re all rank strangers to me.” I’m reminded of Morrissey’s anxious mirror phase through the term “rank strangers” which is an American contrast to the British term “rank outsiders” (c.f. The Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”), a term defining class hierarchy. But Springsteen’s vet feels alien the way only a sincere citizen can — not alienated from a particular social group, but from a class of people who remain unconscious — still illusioned, ignorant or indifferent. And yet, Springsteen’s vet (citizen of the culture that doesn’t believe in class division) still hopes…unsure if he’ll ever get back to a place of comfort and trust. But he’s walking toward it and the song (a daydreaming narrative rather than a nightmare) is the story of that sojourn. “Long Walk Home” is my second favorite Magic track because it dares a powerful, realistic truth with great feeling. Like Morrissey, Springsteen has no truck with pacifying bromides. And though the song goes from wish to fear, doing so through irony is an emotionally generous strategy. Against the truth of social fragmentation and broken promises, Springsteen posits the idea of community and loving parental advice that we had better believe in — or else rot.

The basis for all this in Magic is Springsteen’s regard for humanity — the sense of respect, value, love that is found in the way individuals treat each other. The amazing open-heartedness of the songs’ many characterizations comes down to Springsteen digging the depth and weight of their beings — their souls. These characters are from the same world as Born to Run, but worn ragged by 9/11, the Iraq War and by life as mankind has always endured it. Young Springsteen’s beautiful pop-records-based mythology has given way to something more mature, just as these world-weary people (veterans, waitresses, bikers, tired parents, doubt-filled spouses and frustrated lovers) reach for something deeper than romanticism. The only way he can account for their struggles is through religious analogy — the best source we in the West have for measuring qualities of soul. It’s heard in the references to tradition, crosses-to-bear and to the goodness embodied in a human being as cited in the erotic/religious “I’ll Work for Your Love.”

Way past “Prove It All Night’s” testament to masculine stamina, “I’ll Work for Your Love” is a pledge of devotion, but a pledge that is also a temptation and a struggle — that’s life, ain’t it? That’s love, too. Springsteen’s infatuation with the wonder of loving is the point of the album’s title track — especially after the profound rattling of love, faith and patriotism that has occurred since 9/11 and the Iraq War. Springsteen faces the same fundamental questions as the post-WWII American novelists. His sexual and social response is essential to the rich feeling of a song like “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” which was inspired by depression-era writer Irwin Shaw’s career-defining short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” where an entwined dilemma of marital fidelity and urban stress concentrates attention on lost faith. Springsteen transubstantiates religious faith into personal/carnal wonder and, going further, into social trust. The chorus “This is what we’ll be” sometimes sounds like a prophecy (“This is what will be”). It succeeds either way as a great song lyric has to. Both a promise and a faith, it is this artist’s soulful version of not just the Great American Novel but what lies at the essence of the U.S. Constitution.

Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 movement and Velvet Revolution were informed by a particular kind of consciousness: a mix of aestheticism and the Dionysian spirit of rock and roll. The fact that the revolt was headed by a playwright highlighted its aesthetic aspect.

I was introduced to this dimension of the Czech resistance back in 1990 when I coordinated a speaking tour of Eastern European dissidents (dissidents no longer in 1990) for the Democratic Socialists of America. At one engagement, the speaker -– a very polished Czech student leader -– met a friend of his who happened to be in the United States. The friend was named Andra (I’m rendering the name phonetically) and was thin, pale, and bespectacled, with a distracted manner and scarf looped many times around his neck. Somehow Andra ended up staying at my apartment. He explained to my roommate and me that he belonged to a movement called the Purple Elephant and that the Velvet Revolution was different from other political movements because it was about the, ah, purple elephant. He was making some point about the revolution being aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual -– but exactly what that point was, I’m still not sure.

As for the role of rock in Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution, readers may recall that one of President Havel’s first guests of state was Frank Zappa who became an unofficial cultural attaché of Czechoslovakia. Now Tom Stoppard has brought home to theatergoers in Britain and the U.S. that Charter 77 protested against the imprisonment of a rock group, The Plastic People of the Universe, who were influenced by Zappa, the Velvet Underground, and the Fugs. According to Stoppard, The Plastic People were not political; they were persecuted by the Communist government for a non-conformity that was about style, not ideology.

The way Stoppard presents it, The Plastic People and their fans were the true spiritual/cultural/aesthetic resistance, and Havel and his colleagues were a bunch of well-intentioned, ineffectual, politically-minded fuddy-duddies. The lead character, a PhD named Jan (Rufus Sewell) (who is reduced to unemployment and, later, to working in a bakery because he failed to satisfy the demands of the secret police) is repeatedly asked to sign petitions associated with Havel and other conscientious, politically-minded dissidents. But the only petition that matters is Charter 77, calling for the release of The Plastic People.

Jan’s focus is on cultural/aesthetic aspects of consciousness. The case for consciousness as spirit is made by Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a Cambridge classicist dying from multiple cancers, married to Jan’s Cambridge Marxist mentor Max (Brian Cox). As more of her body decays and is cut away, she becomes upset by Max’s Marxist materialism that sees human beings as purely biological. In a speech (more an aria), breathtakingly performed by Cusack, she argues that she is an essence that has remained intact despite the decay and evisceration of her body. It is that with which she loves Max and which she wants Max to love. Expressing deep emotion without ceding his beliefs -- and making it clear that he is not patronizing her -- Max responds that it is her essence that he loves, but that essence is biological. My mother, with whom I saw the play, backed Max’s side of this argument, noting that that essence would not have remained intact had Eleanor’s cancer been a brain tumor.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is a debate about the philosophies that underlie politics and a specific political event –- the opposition to and overthrow of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Just as the play doesn’t sufficiently develop its philosophical arguments (ignoring the point that a neurological ailment would have diminished the essence of which Eleanor so movingly speaks), it also fails to fully own up to the consequences of Max’s political beliefs. Max is a hard-line Communist who supports the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He alludes to disagreeing with other aspects of Soviet policy, but condemns Eastern Europeans who have opposed the Soviets, dismissing them as wishy-washy abettors of capitalist imperialism. His disagreements with Soviet policy are never clarified. Max is stubborn, arrogant, narcissistic, and, at times, insensitive, but he is ultimately a lovable curmudgeon who deeply loves his wife and cares for his former student Jan. It’s not impossible imagine a hard-line, pro-Soviet Communist who is sincere in his beliefs and is a good, decent human being. The problem is that Stoppard only superficially addresses the brutality that Max has countenanced and doesn’t delve into his rationales for terror.

The play has other flaws. A massive amount of information is touched on but not sufficiently developed. Leaning on a mythy bit of symbolism, Stoppard begins by walking on the wild Dionysian side. (Though in this case it’s actually more Panic than Dionysian.) The play starts with Eleanor’s and Max’s daughter Esme (Alice Eve) seeing a young man playing a pipe on their garden wall. He disappears, and she identifies him as Pan. Later, the adult Esme (now played by Cusack) informs us that the young man was Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd founder and Cambridge native). This Syd Barrett device leads to over-plotting. Esme’s daughter Alice (played by Alice Eve, who also plays the young Esme) finds and cares for the reclusive, drug-addled Barrett. Stoppard gratuitously introduces a caricatured gossip-columnist (Alexandra Neill) who has married Esme’s ex-husband (Quentin Maré), and who has a written vicious piece about Barrett’s decline. Many of the details of this sub-plot whiz by too quickly.

Then there’s Stoppard’s most precious and intellectually ostentatious conceit. Esme ends up following in her mother’s footsteps, studying classics. At the end of the play, her daughter Alice is helping Esme translate a passage from Plutarch -- well-known to classicists but obscure to the vast majority of theatergoers -- in which a sailor hears a voice telling him to proclaim that “great Pan is dead.” What’s this noise? In the play, great Pan seems to have triumphed. Pan (Mick Jagger, with his satyrs, the Rolling Stones) plays Prague. Perhaps the Panic reference points to Syd Barrett’s demise. Or it may be meant to resonate with a quick line about a member of The Plastic People (and/or the whole band) going to the United States. But connection is never established.

Rock ‘n’ Roll moves you, though, despite its missteps. Eleanor’s speech about her essence (though logically flawed) and Max’s response pack a wallop. The images flashed on a scrim of the Rolling Stones playing Prague as their music blares and Jan, Esme, and their friends cheer behind the scrim is as powerful as the "Marseillaise" scene in Casablanca.

Another strength of Rock ‘n’ Roll is that it leaves politically engaged people and philosophical folk with much to think and argue about. This sets it apart from other excellently acted productions of straight plays in this Broadway season. Tracy Letts’ August Osage County is an entertaining retread of 40 years of serio-comic white-trash gothic in the spirit of the substantial Sam Shepard and the insubstantial Beth Henley, the slight substance of which, unlike Rock ‘n’ Roll, cannot sustain its three-and-a-half hours. The terrific cast of the current revival of The Homecoming by the eternally overrated Harold Pinter fails to compensate for the play’s self-conscious and, ultimately meaningless, obscurity.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is excellently acted too, and the performances of its leads make it a truly great production. Rufus Sewell achieves a supreme triumph: without make-up (except for hair extensions in some scenes and age make-up at the end of the play), he completely transforms himself. When Jan speaks English, his childishly effusive way, his use of broad mimicry to make points, and his near-spastic gestures make him uncannily like several Eastern European intellectuals and artists I've met. When he is ostensibly speaking in Czech to his compatriots, his manner is more restrained, suggesting the exuberance compensates for the difficulties of communicating in a second language. These mannerisms render Sewell radically different from his screen persona. Sewell is beautiful and intense-looking to the point of caricature on screen (in fact, his looks were employed for caricature when he played the smoldering and fecund farm lad in the D.H. Lawrence parody Cold Comfort Farm). In Rock ‘n’ Roll his unapproachable movie star looks vanish into amiable goofiness.

Sewell’s one slip could have been corrected by director Trevor Nunn. While Sewell convincingly ages himself by the end of the play, he seems fifteen to twenty years older than Jan should be. This is probably intentional –- an attempt to show how Jan has been prematurely aged by imprisonment, marginalization, and menial labor. But there are other persecuted dissidents in the play who are not similarly wizened.

The issue of the age of the play’s characters relative to each other also undercuts Cusack’s portrayal of the adult Esme. By time of her appearance in the 1980’s, the character should have aged into her 40s given her youthful presence as a late-teen/early 20-something in 1968. But Cusack is in her 50s; Brian Cox, who plays her father, is two years older than she. In early scenes of the play Cox is playing younger than he is. I couldn’t buy Cusack as being in her 40s, nor could I buy her as Cox’s daughter. It is not impossible to accept actors of similar age as parent and child. When he played Hamlet, Laurence Olivier was thirteen years’ older than Eileen Herlie who played Gertrude, and Angela Lansbury was only two years’ older than Laurence Harvey when she played his mother in The Manchurian Candidate (though both of these were Oedipal relationships which the youthfulness of the mothers served). But Cusack, Cox, and Nunn couldn’t persuade me to suspend disbelief. And Cusack’s age affected the substance of Esme as a character. She is supposed to be a burnt out, lost soul, but Cusack’s actual age hyped up the pathos.

This is not meant to diminish Cusack’s great accomplishment as Eleanor. In her hands, the character is intelligent, passionate, tough, funny, eccentric, and charismatic. She more than earned the applause she received after delivering Eleanor’s aria on the spirit. Her portrayal of Eleanor stands out as a magnificent performance.

Brian Cox is excellent as Max; another wonderful performance in a remarkable career, (though not as striking as Sewell’s or Cusack’s).

A production as successful as this is a testament to the director. The recorded snippets of rock songs accompanied by projections of recording credits are effective -- the songs and projections may have been required by Stoppard’s script, but are definitively executed by Nunn and sound designer Ian Dickinson, probably in collaboration with lighting designer Howard Harrison and set designer Robert Jones. Nunn’s collaboration with set designer Jones isn’t all perfection. The two opt for realism though the sets are incomplete, lacking walls downstage right and downstage left. This works fine for Eleanor’s and Max’s comfortable Cambridge house and garden, but less well for Jan’s cramped Prague apartment where the claustrophobic quality is undermined by the open space characters have to travel to get to the bathroom door set in what appears to be the actual stage right wall of the stage’s wings.

Another well-intentioned idea that fails (not unlike socialism) is Nunn’s handling of accents. He uses an idea employed in 1993 to brilliant effect in Mark Wing Davey’s New York production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest at Manhattan Theatre Club. The first and third acts of that play (which deals with the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania) depict Romanians speaking Romanian to each other. The second act is a dramatization of interviews with Romanians conducted by Churchill, Wing-Davey, and Wing-Davey’s students’ (from the Central School of Speech and Drama). In the first and third acts, the American actors spoke English with their own accents, since Romanians speaking Romanian would not hear their own language as accented. In the second act, when Romanians talked with English interviewers, the actors spoke English with Romanian accents –- the distinction between speaking one’s own language without an accent and speaking a foreign language with an accent was clear. Nunn borrows this linguistic strategy in Rock ‘n’ Roll. But it’s problematic for two reasons. First, the distinction between Czechs’ speaking their own language and speaking English is not as stark as it was for the Romanians in Mad Forest. Second, when I saw Mad Forest it was performed by American actors for an American audience; in this production of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the leads are English and the supporting actors use English accents. Thus, when talking among themselves, the Czechs have English accents which is confusing to an American audience.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. Thanks to the outstanding performances of its lead actors, and the fact that both the strengths and weaknesses of Stoppard’s script provide food for thought, Rock ‘n’Roll is the most satisfying production I've seen in New York this season.

That’s how you got rid of Dinkins, he was too conservative, so you hooted and hollered until you got a real militant, Adolph Giuliani & here we are today w/ yr boy the billionaire mayor whose nose opens wider each day at the sight of Obama running. Like Rock & Roll, it needs our inspiration!

But it has got to be clear that the less we do, the less we can expect Obama to respond to us. It is the fundamental reaction of most politicians that they respond to the sharpest presence, although we shd know that under the capitalist election shenanigans, it is always money that speaks loudest, which is why one of our constant calls in trying to transform the US political culture, that we demand all private monies be eliminated from elections. In fact the first of our ongoing political tasks is to relentlessly call for the transformation of the US Political culture! The elimination of the Electoral College, One Person, One vote, to eliminate the anti democratic Winner take all system. The abolition of the Senate to be replaced by a single (unicameral) House of Representatives. Restoration of voting rights to ex felons. Elections of a single day, direct democracy i.e. voting at the workplace, school &c compulsory voting…if taxation is compulsory, voting shd be too.

But those are a few of the tasks to be taken up by an energized Black population and in alliance with a Left Block of the broadest population no matter what happens ultimately to Obama. Yet it is the most obvious infantile left-anarchist error that haunts our movement, to constantly be talking about Revolution and not even participate in one of the most obvious ways of seizing some power.

I have heard seriously flawed arguments that Obama is not “Black enough!” You better be checking out his politics not his melanin. Though w/ an African father and very Black grandmother, he probably closer to the Mother land than most of us straight out Black Americans, for whom our direct connection with Africa was over by the 19th c.

Plus is Hillary (or Edwards) blacker? Despite some deluded Bloods I know who called Bill Clinton “the lst Black president,” is that why he passed that crime bill, wasted welfare & established states’ rights on many social programs.

We are the people of the double consciousness, both Black & American, but if we understand DuBois’ equation properly we shd know that mean that we struggle for equal Citizenship rights as well as Self Determination!

To support Obama is to grasp both ends of that double consciousness, aware of the contradiction but also the dialectic that makes that social twoness of use to us.

But we must understand that we are now at a stage of struggle for a People’s Democracy, a Revolutionary Democracy, where our maximum accomplishment at this stage of struggle wd be a United Front Government, based on an alliance of multinational workers, the progressive petty bourgeoisie, farmers, all democratic forces and even with the shaky national bourgeoisie. Such an accomplishment wd still be a transitional stage, but an incrementally closer step toward socialism.

National oppression, racism, the oppression of women and gays will never cease until monopoly capitalism is put under control and then depowered and then eliminated. But we cannot airbrush or dismiss as unnecessary all those stages that will one day enable us to do that.

The mass support of Obama by the national Afro American movement, especially its progressive sector will reinvigorate our struggle. We can not merely stand on the side lines and be chumped-off, mumbling as one super-militant sister in DC recently read in a poem putting down Hillary & Obama & ending “Only the white man will win.” A white racist cd’ve sd that! Is that all we're good for now?

The Republican Right has co-opted the Negro as a bow to the civil rights movement. Slicker than the Democrats, Condoleeza, Tom Ass, The Colon, have been energized like that Battery operated rabbit to delude the lowest of us here & around the world -- that somehow that represents real democracy. We must enter into that mainstream struggle & make our own demands, utilize the pressure of our needs & our numbers. We are almost fifty million people with the 16th GNP in the world...almost 600 Billion dollars a year. We have the muscle and the money –- We need to make our move.

A massive Afro American presence around Obama’s campaign shd be utilized by us not only to renew the Afro American struggle, but also as a method of recreating the reality of a national Afro American political assembly, democratically elected from all 50 states, able to support our friends, oppose our enemies in whatever way we see fit!

With such a presence we cd have stopped the Bush seizure of power in Florida & so prevented the Ohio recurrence. The Black American must have a self determined power base that can be brought into focus and perhaps one ignition spark can be supplied by our consolidating a correct relationship to the Obama campaign. No matter what America does in the nomination or election!

You can’t believe how hard it is to bury the dead. No one wants them. We bury about 100 a week. Their poverty and humiliation still hound them after they are dead. Their disgraceful condition, their lack of a spot even to drop dead on, their exile from a final resting place, are haunting realities. When we recently brought a score of corpses of the destitute to their final resting place last week, we were met by a posse of peasants who demanded money and would not let us pass to the twenty graves we had dug. There was quite a fight between my team, who were there to manage all the coffins and the graves, and the peasants who insisted they could make a fortune on that land by saving it for a cell phone company antenna. They insisted their deal with the company would be ruined by our bones.

I knew it was State land. I knew the dead have been dumped there for 30 years. But I had no energy left to fight and I called for the gravediggers, the team of 20 pall bearers, and all the coffins to go to a place in Cite Soleil the Mayor said we could have for funerals, but which we had not yet prepared for lack of resources. My team refused to leave and wanted to defend the dead. The small music band that always comes to play for the funerals (I call them the “other” grateful dead) struck up a lively tune. The fight was on. The police soon came, and went to the highest bidder…me. Yes, I could outdo the protesting peasants -- gas money, a little money for lunch, a little extra for Christmas. The dead now rested in peace.

The human heart beats in darkness, against darkness, and easily becomes darkness. But it longs for light, true light. At Christmas we celebrate the presence of a new heart beating among us. Small at first, but over a very few years it grows in strength, wisdom and grace. If we want, this sacred heart beats first next to ours, then with ours, and then in ours. Each beat generates light, the true light that the darkness cannot overcome. Darkness loses its power, and falls from its throne as victor. It becomes simply “opponent.” Even its opposition is self defeating, since it only increases longing for the Sacred Heart, whose power and light we come to share. This power and light reveal His name, but we find we have always known it. His name is “Wonderful, Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

May it be ever in our hearts and on our lips.

Obama’s slogan “Stand For Change,” is a non-starter for Reed who’s been working to build a Labor Party in America for over a decade. From where he’s sitting, the Obama campaign seems unlikely to nurture the kinds of class-consciousness needed to transform this country. I doubt I can convince Reed to walk with Obama, but I recently came across a transcript of a video commentary by a Law Professor named Lawrence Lessig (See: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2008/02/05/transcript-of-lawrence-lessig-obama-video) that might speak to other non-believers. I’ve excerpted a portion of it below and then added on some material drawn from Obama’s own statements and writings, from a declaration of the Industrial Areas Foundation (which helped shape Obama's world-view), and from a recent Washington Post article by Charles Peters. While my name is on this piece of web-work, I’m functioning more as an assembler than author.

Let’s get back to Hillary’s fans. They treat her polarizing public persona as a virtue, her “negatives” mutate into positives since a Democrat will need “sharp elbows” to beat the Republicans next fall. Clarity about the limits of civility in politics is all good. If a fight’s coming, roll up on it. But Clintons put a mean, trivializing spin on political conflict. It’s all about them and they tend to cut corners with the truth. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Clintons have lied on Obama. Lessig explicitly connects their tactics in this campaign with Karl Rove’s. Making his case for Obama, Lessig looks back…

When I think about the worst in politics in the last fifteen years there are two features that stand out for me. One is the lack of moral courage of candidates and presidents like Bill Clinton, and second, a lack of political decency, in particular around the elections that got this man (Bush) into office orchestrated by this extraordinary figure, Karl Rove. Think about Karl Rove's tactics in South Carolina, where he made racial suggestions through push-polling that drove many Republicans away from John McCain, probably costing McCain the election. Suggestions that were false and were extraordinarily unfair and that were made for the purpose of defeating the opponent.

But this is the way all politics will be only if we reward this kind of behavior. And that’s a good reason, following Lorna, for people who support Hillary Clinton to either criticize her campaign or switch to support Barack Obama.

Obama himself realizes exactly what he’s up against: “the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election.” But he’s more than an anti-Clinton who deserves credit for good behavior. One of his responses in the South Carolina debate helps define what makes his politics different not just from Clinton’s but every other presidential candidate of our time (including Edwards, Nader, Kucinich et. al.). Late in the debate, which was held on Martin Luther King’s birthday, the moderator asked each of the candidates why King would’ve or should’ve supported him or her. Edwards responded first. Invoking his commitment to “end poverty,” he offered “two reasons.” A more reflective Obama turned the question around:

Well, I don’t think Dr. King would endorse any of us. I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable, and this goes to the core differences, I think, in this campaign. I believe change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that. (APPLAUSE) It was those women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus, union workers who are willing to take on violence and intimidation to get the right to organize. It was women who decided, “I'm as smart as my husband. I'd better get the right to vote”…Them arguing, mobilizing, agitating, and ultimately forcing elected officials to be accountable, I think that's the key...So that has been a hallmark of my career, transparency and accountability, getting the American people involved. That's how we're going to bring about change. That’s why I want to be president of the United States, to respect the power of the American people to bring about change.

Obama’s respectful mode isn’t about false modesty. He wants to be a great president and he knows that’s impossible unless Americans become a great people. That equation is the basis for a radical yet supremely practical politics. Earlier this year, Lawrence Goodwyn, a historian who knows as much as anyone about America’s organizing traditions wrote a piece for the Nation drawing a parallel between the 2006 Democratic sweep and the 1930 Congressional elections that preceded the Democratic landslide two years later. The election of 1932, of course, led to the New Deal’s massive social programs and helped enable the unionization of America’s industrial working class. (An Italian Red sect in the 70’s once suggested there’s been one Dictatorship of the Proletariat in history – FDR’s New Deal coalition.) Obama understands America may be at a moment when a similar a kind of transformative electoral politics is now possible. But only if Democrats refuse to accept Rovian tactics and the micro-management style of poll-driven politicians who assume triangulating toward victory, even by the tiniest margins, is all that matters. Obama made the case for thinking big at the South Carolina debate:

The truth is that we as Democrats have not had a working majority in a very long time. And what I mean by that is a working majority that could push through the kinds of bold initiatives that all of us have proposed. And one of the reasons that I am running for president is because I believe that I can inspire new people to get involved in the process, that I can reach out to independents and, yes, some Republicans who have also lost trust in their government and want to see something new. When you look at Bush and Cheney and their record, the one good thing they've done for us is they have given their party a very bad name. (APPLAUSE) That gives us a unique opportunity in this election, and what we can’t do, I think, is just to take the playing field as a given. We want to expand the scope of the electorate so that we can start getting a 60 percent majority, more folks in the House, more folks in the Senate, and I think that's something I can do. And that's why we've seen record turnout in every election so far. I’m not taking all the credit for it. I think people are voting against George Bush. But I also think that we've inspired people who had not previously voted before, and that's what the Democratic Party has to do.

Obama’s sense of possibility is way over Hillary’s head. And that became apparent when when she picked up on his Change theme at one of the debates:

Well, let me say first, that I think we're all advocating for change; we all want to change the status quo, which is George Bush and the Republican domination of Washington for so many years.

But, as Lawrence Lessig asks, “Is that really all we're trying to achieve in this election, to get the Republicans out of office?” Lessig notes that Obama (and Edwards) not only sounded a call for more fundamental change, they backed up that call by refusing to take money from lobbyists or PACs who rule Washington. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a quid pro quo pro as the following exchange at the yearly Kos convention last summer indicates:

[A question for Hillary Clinton] Senator Edwards has really a very straightforward question here, which is will you continue to take money from lobbyists or will you take his position...[Hillary’s response] Yes I will. I will, because you know a lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not...represent real Americans.

But as Lessig points out:

The question is not who they represent,though they represent a lot of foreign entities as well...the question is whether their influence represents — mis-represents — solutions for America. Whether the effect they have and the power they have in controlling the agenda and access to members of Congress shifts the way Congress responds to the issues.

Lessig’s analysis of Clinton’s business as usual perspective, resonates even more after one glances at the opening pages of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, which signal his, Obama’s, seriousness about taking on the culture of lobbyists. Obama evokes his feelings of awe when he first entered the Senate Hall and recalls his first respectful meetings with old masters of the institution. But he’s not just happy to have been there. His eye has traveled. He notes how speeches given in the Senate Hall tend to be canned presentations for the cameras: “In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no-one is listening.” The speeches are for show; the real work is being done on the down-low with the lobbyists behind closed doors. Obama understands his challenge is to open it all up – to create a context where public discourse amounts to more than partisan cover stories, more than empty oratory.

When Obama calls Hillary out now for being too secretive when she approached healthcare reform in the 90’s, he’s not scoring a cheap point. His argument follows from his whole understanding of the right relations between politicians and the people. There’s been a lot of talk lately about details of the candidates’ healthcare plans. (Edwards’ plan seems to have been the best.) But there was an important recent exchange between the candidates that wasn’t so wonky. During the last debate Obama proposed that “instead of negotiating behind closed doors,” he’d push to bring all parties together and have the negotiations “broadcast on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”

Because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process. And overcoming the special interests and the lobbyists who -- Senator Clinton is right. They will resist anything that we try to do. My plan, her plan, they will try to resist. And the antidote to that is making sure that the American people understand what is at stake. I am absolutely committed to making sure that anybody in America who needs health care is going to get it.

BLITZER: I just want to be precise, and I'll let Senator Clinton respond. But you say broadcast on C-SPAN these deliberations. Is that a swipe at Senator Clinton because...

OBAMA: No, it’s not a swipe. This is something that I've been talking about consistently. What I want to do is increase transparency and accountability to offset the power of the special interests and the lobbyists.(APPLAUSE) If a drug company -- if the drug companies or a member of Congress who's carrying water for the drug companies wants to argue that we should not negotiate for the cheapest available price on drugs, then I want them to make that argument in front of the American people. And I will have experts who explain that, in fact, it is legitimate for drug companies to make profits, but they are making outsized profits on the backs of senior citizens who need those prescription drugs. And that is an argument that the American people have to be involved with, otherwise we're not going to get any plan through.

Hillary wasn’t trying to see that – “Now I think we might be able to [put all those deliberations on C-SPAN] but that’s a little heavier lift than what the president is going to propose, because what happens is we have to have a coalition.” At the risk of making too much of this exchange, I was struck (once again) by Obama’s instinct to stimulate political engagement and Clinton’s ho-humming the prospect of the American people joining in a democratic discussion.

The candidates’ very different impulses on this score probably testify to their different life-experiences. I recall reading somewhere that Hillary once wrote a thesis about Saul Alinsky’s projects. But Obama spent a couple years of his life working as a community organizer under the aegis of the Industrial Areas Foundation (which was put together by Alinskyites). Here's an excerpt from the IAF’s mission statement, which still seems to inform Obama’s own approach to politics.

The IAF is non-ideological and strictly non-partisan, but proudly, publicly, and persistently political. The IAF builds a political base within society's rich and complex third sector - the sector of voluntary institutions that includes religious congregations, labor locals, homeowner groups, recovery groups, parents associations, settlement houses, immigrant societies, schools, seminaries, orders of men and women religious, and others. And then the leaders use that base to compete at times, to confront at times, and to cooperate at times with leaders in the public and private sectors

The IAF develops organizations that use power - organized people and organized money - in effective ways. The secret to the IAF's success lies in its commitment to identify, recruit, train, and develop leaders in every corner of every community where IAF works. The IAF is indeed a radical organization in this specific sense: it has a radical belief in the potential of the vast majority of people to grow and develop as leaders, to be full members of the body politic, to speak and act with others on their own behalf. And IAF does indeed use a radical tactic: the face-to-face, one-to-one individual meeting whose purpose is to initiate a public relationship and to re-knit the frayed social fabric.

Obama’s account of his own ("face-to-face") organizing in South Chicago (in his memoir Dreams from My Father) tells how he witnessed everyday people, some of whom he would not have "picked" to become leaders, grow into their own capacities to take on authority figures in public. I’m reminded, just now, of Obama’s story of a crew from Altgeld project who confronted officials at the Chicago Housing Authority who were prevaricating about asbestos levels in their apartments. “Obama’s army” that day included one pious, married lady who was used to being patronized. She started off shaky but steadied as she suddenly found herself holding "her first press conference.” When one CHA official finally stopped disrespecting the Altgeld insurgents and started playing nice, another woman rebuked him: “We don’t need your donuts, we need answers.”

Obama’s tale of how these woman found their voices came back to me when Hillary touted her own moment of self-discovery on the campaign trail. Obama seems to have realized long ago that if politics is chiefly about insiders like him (and Hillary), it’s nothing. The point is to encourage America's outsiders to realize their capacity to change themselves and the world…

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” That line from Obama’s Super Tuesday speech sounded to my ears like a play on the famous feminist line: “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” What gives Obama’s rhetoric of hope such amazing grace is his capacity to invoke the truths of identity politics without sublating class matters.

Hillary’s own identity politics makes her preferable to her husband (who stands for zip but his own sense of entitlement). One of her feminist supporters, recently called attention to Hillary’s mid-90s speech in China, where she defied State Department officials and spoke forthrightly about the oppression of women. But, even in this speech, probably her finest moment in public life, she came across as a woman on top. “We come together in fields and in factories. We come together in village markets and supermarkets. We come together in living rooms and board rooms.” [Emphasis added.] But women who “come together” in factories are a world away from those who mix in board rooms. While Obama talks (too) easily about transcending divisions between “rich and poor,” he has a basic street sense of what separates someone who sat on Walmart’s corporate board from the women he organized with in South Chicago.

There’s a section of Obama’s Dreams where he dives into a second wave feminism that’s less class-bound (and race-bound) than Hillary’s. Obama recalls how a black woman he was working with in Chicago -- a single mother -- once showed up for a community meeting wearing blue contact lens. He allows that he responded with less than perfect sensitivity to this woman’s self-image issues. A couple weeks later, he redeemed himself slightly by arranging for his comrade to see the play For Colored Girls…

For the next hour [the seven black women] took turns telling their stories, singing their songs. They sang about lost time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse.

Her eyes, deep brown, were shimmering. I grabbed her gloved hand and gave it a quick squeeze before starting to drive. Nothing more was said; for the entire ride back to the South Side, until I left her at the door and wished her good-night, we never broke that precious silence.

I hope feminists who assume Hillary would be “better for women” try to hear that “precious silence.” Maybe they’ll have second thoughts.

Obama notes that his experience with Ruby shook up his own predisposition to erect a wall “between psychology and politics, the state of our pocketbooks and the state of our souls.” Obama’s body and soul talk here doesn’t quite fit that IAF template and I can imagine skeptical responses from organizers who know black (and white) working class people need unions and broad-scale solidarity more than fleeting personal experiences of self-validation. But you don’t need to buy into Generation O – Obama! Oprah! Orgasms? – to recognize that class consciousness is necessary but not sufficient to comprehend the life of desire in America. Obama’s responsiveness to the varieties of urgency (and suppression) in our culture isn’t a sign that he’ll give into the Imperial Middle muddle. It’s a testament to the range of his sociological imagination and his recognition that most Americans choose NOT be defined solely by their lives on the job. (While that makes it hard as hell to organize them, there’s something life-affirming about their Great Refusals.)

Obama’s variousness can seem like a con. Especially to those who assume politics must be about potholes, not uplift. “Obama is just a preacher,” said a Hillary-backer with undisguised contempt. Skepticism of his Churchy side is widespread among secular “progressive” types. I know where they’re coming from. I recall feeling superior when Bush claimed (in one of his debates with Gore) his favorite political philosopher was Jesus. But that just proved how little I knew about the genealogy of morals. Right around the time Obama was getting into the race, I came across Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Public Men, Private Women, which turned out to be right on time for the upcoming campaign. It was a kick in the head to discover Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis – great 20th Century philosophers of democracy and freaks for the Greeks – missed how the originary Christian Moment turned this Man’s Man’s Man’s World upside down. For it was Jesus – God Bless ‘im – who upheld homey values of kindness and compassion that had always been consigned to the domestic sphere and dissed as women things, unworthy of the agora.

Obama doesn’t bow down to Christers. He went out of his way to push the congregation at Martin Luther King’s church. “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them.” In that setting, the underscored word underlined the deeply unchristian aspect of homophobia. Obama’s ease with gay people is probably a sign of his worldliness and urbanity. But he has the wit not to mix up his rejection of intolerance with off-putting tics of bi-coastal elites. Recall that line from his 2004 Keynote speech: “We got some gay friends in the Red States…”

Obama the empath irritates both hard leftists and Democratic party partisans who know that anger is an energy. A capacity to imagine others from within will tend to make enemies seem less hateful, more human. Obama is, notoriously, not an Angry Black Man. But his cool shouldn’t be confused with a lack of passion or a lack of clarity. His line on the American Dilemma is marked by his lucidity about “the trouble with friendship.”

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we've come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We've come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily - that it's just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved. All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

If that seems a little abstract, check his one-liner protesting against: “Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others.”

Obama has backed up such words with deeds. His most important achievement as a State Senator was the bill he got through the Illinois legislature which mandated all police interrogations and confessions be videotaped. The idea was to stop cops from beating confessions out of suspects. Charles Peters recently offered an account of how Obama got his “heart and soul” bill passed over the initial objections of the law enforcement establishment, Illinois’s Governor, Republicans who were “automatically tough on crime,” Democrats who were scared to seem “soft on crime,” and anti-death penalty advocates who worried that Obama’s bill “by preventing the execution of innocents would deprive them of their best argument.” When the police lobby proposed to limit the videotaping to confessions, Obama held out “knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning.” He not only prevailed, he was so persuasive “that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0.” And then Obama talked the Governor into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

Peters argues that Obama’s successes in the Illinois Legislature (where he passed other significant legislation) indicates “Obama’s campaign claim that he can persuade Americans to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.”

Obama's campaign may falter. Perhaps it won't amount to much more than a re-run of Jesse Jackson’s last try. But, then again, Obama’s deeds as a legislator distance him from Jackson’s decades of speech acts. That and the fact that the race for the nomination is still on suggest that maybe there really is something new under the sun.

Obama explained how/why he believed change is going to come at the end of his speech on Martin Luther King’s birthday. So lets end this by giving him the last word.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.