Tom Watson

The Cultural Yearling

Tonight, a bunch of newcritics bloggers are getting together at the Paley Center for Media to celebrate our little experiment, which is a year old. I have an anniversary post up - so hop over and read it, if you'd like. Here's an excerpt:

You know, newcritics is non-influential. It is non-profitable. Indeed, by any standards of the day it is non-successful. And yet a year on, we gather to revel (some in person, some virtually) in the minor media glory - but sweet karmic profit - of this little blog. Why? Because we like each other. That’s obvious in the courteous style of our site, and in the ongoing conversation each week. But we’re also genuinely interested in what each of us has to say about media - about film, television, music, theater, and books. And in our careers, our disparate lives, a place to turn for some polite middlebrow conversation over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee is a very nice thing indeed.

Some of the greatest bloggers in the world will make the scene tonight, including our host, the fabulous M.A. Peel, but we're also marking the anniversary with a series of posts about how a single bit of media moved each of them over the last year. Some great thoughts in these posts:

Pretty in P!nk
Lost Lust
Once in a Lifetime
Shrunken Heads Revisited
R.I.P. The Wall Street Journal
A Bit O’ Media…
What Is The Question?
A Reason to Go On Living: The Poor Boy’s on the Line
The Reblog Button

Edwards Bows

John Edwards has been relegated to an after-thought these last couple of weeks, and after Florida's beauty contest last night, he saw the hard political handwriting and will reportedly make an exit today - symbolically - in New Orleans. The wingnuts rejoice over the defeat of the most liberal of the remaining Democrats:

He won’t be missed. Not the cloying, braying sanctimony. Not the hypocritical Fox-bashing. Not the oleaginous class warfare. Not the odious politicization of Memorial Day.

That was the odious Michele Malkin. But she's got it wrong - those are exactly the reasons Edwards will be missed.

I don't know who his supporters go to, or whether he will endorse Obama or Clinton or neither. But I know which party gets to keep his ideas, and that's a good thing.

UPDATE: Somebody smart just told me something I have to repeat: for the first time in American history, the nominee of a major party won't be a white male.  Obvious, yeah. But when you say it aloud...

And Now For Some Real News

The Mets have traded for the fireballing left-handed ace of the Minnesota Twins, Johann Santana, giving them the best rotation in the National League East. According to USA Today:

The deal is pending the Mets and Santana reaching agreement on a six- or seven-year contract extension and that Santana passes a physical; they have been granted a 48 to-72-hour window to do so. Santana has a no-trade clause that he will waive if agreement is reached on a contract extension.

Santana won the American League Cy Young Award in 2004 and 2006 and is 93-44 lifetime. The Mets gave up centerfielder Carlos Gomez and pitchers Phil Humber, Deolis Guerra and Kevin Mulvey. Patience clearly paid off for Omar Minaya.

On to Florida! [Port St. Lucie, of course - what, you thought I meant that  primary today in which a million Democrats are voting - the one that "won't count."]

State of Diss Union

Did you see Barack Obama's discourteous snub of rival Hillary Clinton before President Bush's mail-it-in final State of the Union Speech last night? The peppy Senator Clinton, rather than avoid the headline-making Camelot duo of Teddy Kennedy and his young iconic pal, strode right over and stuck out her hand with that spunky grin of hers flashing serious kilowattage. Recognizing the gamesmanship, Kennedy grinned and shook it. Obama turned away, frowning deeply, finding something much more interesting in the middle distance of Claire McCaskill's hair.

It was a moment of the finest reality programming - described by the talkers and captured in what Keith Olbermann described as Pulitzer shot by veteran AP lensman Scott Applewhite - that a couple of centuries of disharmonious union can possibly produce. This political junkie loves the SOTU, not for the speeches - which drone on incessantly, with their menacing Cheney teeth-sucking backdrop, lately leavened by a dash of Pelosi room-surfing - "oh look, there's Justice Breyer!"

Last night, the drama was in the room, not at the podium - Senator Biden walked Clinton (an endorsement, perhaps?), Senator Obama cutting in front of several colleagues to stroll in with Uncle Teddy, the hugs and kisses and man-punches down the aisle. And there was my Congressman, the large-skulled Eliot Engel, in his usual camping spot, down the row on the left, in prime C-span territory. I remember camping out for Stones tickets, but Eliot pitches his tent for a chance at pumping Steney Hoyer's fist on camera. Traditionally, Engel waiting for the President is the first sign of spring in New York politics, well before the first crocus.

So Obama capped a day that was supposed to lift Democrats' spirits by connecting the martyred vision of JFK with a swarm of young voters with a rude gesture that will only remind many women of his nasty "likeable enough" crack in New Hampshire. For a speaker of such grace, the surprise lies in such boorish moments.

Still, you had to love Teddy's late-season moment in the sun yesterday, even if Chris Matthews did torture his usual logic of a generational "change election" in which  political dynasties - like Dylan's cannonball - are forever banned: a difficult argument to make faced with a gaggle of Kennedys led by the 75-year-old lion in winter. Great theater, though. Top drawer.

And while Bush droned on as yesterday's man, one intrepid group I'm proud to know ignored Obama's singularly ungracious moment and soldiered mightily in the cause of analyzing actual policy. The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy pulled the proverbial all-nighter to provide a rapid analysis of the President's proposals to Congress. Please read their analysis and comment on it, but I think Andrea summed it up quite well at the top:

The American people want change. Every Presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican, has made this a mantra. But the State of the Union Address reveals no alteration from President George W. Bush. This year the President labored to keep breathing life into the same worn out ideology that has repeatedly failed America’s current and aspiring middle class.

Obama's Sad Victory

After Iowa, I felt good about Barack Obama and his campaign, even though my candidate lost. I loved his speech that night, and believed he was good for the progressive side of American politics. But after the last week, Obama's victory in South Carolina tastes like thin, salt-less gruel to this hopeful Democrat. It nourishes no one except the hard-core partisans, and its audacity - to use the favorite word du jour - was evident only in its cynical partnership with the rabidly anti-Clinton, race-baiting media.

It was a great political victory with a terribly sour after-taste, as Craig Crawford notes this morning:

The Obama camp was smart to gin up any plausible rationale for sidelining or ridiculing the former president. For the most part, he is an asset for his wife, the New York senator.

It was certainly brilliant for Obama’s team to enlist the aid of the news media in stirring up racial resentment against the Clintons – going back to New Hampshire when reporters and pundits promoted the bogus notion that Obama lost the state because of racism. That still unproven charge had to help Obama’s forces get the attention of African-American voters in South Carolina.

But it was sad to see so many in the news media become tools for one campaign’s agenda.

When you watch the likes of conservatives Joe Scarborough, Bill Bennett, Byron York, Andy Sullivan, George Will and Peggy Noonan "worry" about how the racial divide will split the Democratic Party, a slow burning rise of bile burns the throat. Digby:

So, this ugly race is over and it looks like all the racial talk was overblown and overplayed. The voters, once again, made their voices heard and the politicians will have to heed them.

I would hope that the media will take a little breather as well. Watching the concern trolling about Democratic racial divisiveness among people like Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough and Bill Bennett is enough to make me sick and should give progressives pause. As I wrote last night, I don't think this helps Senator Obama any more than it helps Clinton.

Twice now, the Obama camp has been too smug and too clever by half - early on, they enjoyed the vicious and openly sexist campaign against Hillary Clinton, until the "likeable enough" backlash cost them in New Hampshire and forced an on-air apology from Chris Matthews. In South Carolina, they cleverly played the race card - and I mean cleverly with all the sincerity of a reporter who once covered the mean streets of Bronx politics. They demonized Bill Clinton (who did a pretty good job of helping out, it must be said) and assisted in making the Clinton campaign seem racist - even though not a single racist statement has ever been attributed to either the Clintons themselves or to any of their bungling surrogates. They allowed the media to claim that the use of the word "fairytale" and any mention of Obama's youthful drug use was racially-tinged, even if the words came from black men who'd fought all their lives for civil rights. Why? Because they know the villagers (as Digby calls them) hate the Clintons, and always have. Lance Mannion:

The story is arising out of the same old prejudice against the Clintons.  The bullshit about Hillary being so goddamn ambitious, as if no other politician in American history ever actually wanted to an election, is a legacy.  It was Bill who was originally the ambitious one, the one who would do anything to win, like read polls and find out what voters wanted and then give it to them, the snake!

If they'd thought of it they'd have begun calling her Slick Hilly a long time ago.

They, of course, are the insiders' insiders of the Washington Insider establishment, the royalists and their journalist toadies, who have always been appalled by the Clintons' presumption.

For me (and I suspect for many other Democrats who feel silenced by the sexist anti-Clinton media onslaught), Barack Obama wasn't knocked off his pedestal by Bill and Hillary Clinton. He climbed down himself, with David Axelrod holding his hand. And he'll never reclaim that lofty position again.

Sadly, many normally sane observers bought into the national media lines. Hell, even Al Giordano - who claims he's pretty "hardboiled about politics" but fairly melts under the chosen one's gaze - actually says, "Obama became inoculated against the most powerful plays in the Clinton playbook." What plays, Al? What playbook? You actually think the Clintons took billionaire Bob Johnson aside and said "hey Bob, can you slyly inject race into this contest by  appearing to clumsily refer to Obama's drug use?" It's patently absurd, and guys like Giordano and Bob Herbert at the Times - who used a single anonymous comment from an unattributed blog to cry racism this week in a shockingly juvenile column - ought to know better. So should the Josh Marshalls of the world, who actually have the temerity to claim that President Clinton's comparision of Obama and Jesse Jackson as pioneers to African-Americans was a racist ploy. Hey Josh, my second presidential vote went to Jesse Jackson, pal. The man was a pioneer. Inoculated? As if the Republicans won't dig up the very dirt the Obama campaign itself sent out regarding a racial divide that didn't actually exist?

The morning after Iowa, I felt pretty good about the future of the Democratic Party. This morning, I need a shower to wash away the slime of Obama's not-very-subtle partnership with the sickening race-baiting media.

Sour grapes, you suggest? Hell yeah. Not at the primary win, but at the sheer dishonesty openly employed by the Obama campaign and its media enablers. And there are millions and millions like me - Democrats who once thought they could happily vote for Barack Obama as a decent second choice. If it comes to it, I'll still pull the lever against any Republican, but I'll know what I'm getting now.

UPDATE: Once again, Barack Obama is singularly ungracious in victory.

UPDATE II: Big Tent Democrat, always a cynic (though an Obama supporter), absolutely nails it over at TalkLeft:

Regarding the Media coverage of this primary season it now seems clear that there is a new rule that objectivity and appearances thereof are out the window. Certainly at NBC this is true. From the far right commentators like Joe Scarborough to the liberal newscaster Keith Olbermann and Establishment columnists like Eugene Robinson and Margaret Carlson any pretense of not openly rooting against the Clintons has now been discarded. NBC's performance last night was unlike any other I have seen outside of Fox News. Olbermann, who likes to trash Fox, properly in my view, should pause for a moment and consider how much his broadcast last night resembled Fox.

But Barack Obama has an opportunity here to make these new rules, as they pertain to him, lasting. And so does the progressive blogosphere. I have long stated that Obama is a Media Darling, and indeed it is one of the main reasons I tepidly support him for the nomination.

He then lists a bunch of rules that basically boil down to: any criticism of Barack Obama is now to be considered "vaguely racist."

UPDATE III: It's incredible to me how supposedly liberal commentators are eager to smear Jesse Jackson, and ignore his record as Presidential pioneer. Do they forget that in 1988 - the famed "Year of Jackson" proclaimed by Times political writer R.W. Apple - Jesse Jackson won 11 primaries and caucuses, and racked up seven million votes? He won a majority of Hispanic votes in New York, and 14 percent of the white vote nationally. He was the first crossover black candidate for President, and he seriously challenged Michael Dukakis from the left. Yet according to Josh Marshall and this poorly-informed DailyKos diarist, the invocation of his name by President Clinton (who is close to Jackson) is some kind of racist smear against Obama. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

UPDATE IV: Jesse Jackson weighs in.

Four More Years! Four More Years!

It was a cold January day four years ago when this blog was born. Warren Zevon (gone only four months) was on my mind when I added "My Dirty Life & Times" after my own name and conceived this space as a place to share what was on my mind, regardless of anyone else's interest. As it turns out, there was a fair amount of interest - in politics, media, baseball, music, and general observations of a verbose middle-aged guy from New York - and many of you have shared the ride. My view then, confirmed since, was that life holds many twists and turns, that most of what we see and think and pretend to know is written in shades of gray. I give you my version. You knock it down (or agree, or add some detail), and we have a conversation.

This community has been very important to me over those four years, but I'm taking a bit of a break - and it's for a good reason.

I've signed to write a book that's due to my publisher later this spring. The book is called CauseWired, and it explores the collision of media technology with social, charitable, and political causes. My experiences here will figure prominently in the book, which will identify the major trends in wired social causes and seek to draw some key conclusions. So who'll want to read it? I'm hoping it will appeal to a wide group of people in business, in the nonprofit world, in politics, and even in the general reading public.

I hope the timing is good. The business pages are filled with stories of start-up companies and massive valuations. Google grows ever more rapidly into a global powerhouse. And the reach of social networks like Facebook stretches every day. Americans are living more of their lives in public, creating vast lists of online “friends” and professional colleagues, sharing their experiences, their taste in music, their political choices, and even their personal lives.

No trend is hotter than the rush to create social networks, the vast intertwined next generation of the web that promises real-time connection and communication. Americans of all ages are taking part, but no group is more enthusiastic – and more empowered – than the so-called “millennials,” that demographic slice of our society that has never known life without the Internet. These young men and women now entering the workforce for the first time have lived much of their lives online, and they bring with them in their introduction to the national economy – and our society – great expectations for lightning-fast communications, openness and transparency, and the ability to change the landscape quickly.

At the same time, the world is a smaller place. Genocide in remote villages in the east African nation of Darfur is covered by Google maps that show the devastation and religious cleansing, while hundreds of bloggers write about the terrible story – not merely passing along links from mainstream media organizations, but urging action and placing a premium on their own opinion. On Facebook, the fastest-growing online social network in the world, hundreds of thousands of people – students, young professionals, political action committees, and even gray-haired CEOs and captains of industry – signal their support for stopping the slaughter and helping the victims by placing badges on their individual profiles. Video sharing brings the story home, and thousands of digital photographs are trade and posted on blogs and social networks. Keywords and tags allow anyone interested in the topic to explore a massive cultural document – the living expansion of the topic in public consciousness – through blog networks and search engines. Darfur becomes more than a yellowing news-clipping down in the backroom of the public library, more than a research report, more than a news story from far away. It becomes a cause. More accurately, Darfur becomes "CauseWired."

Yes, it's a term of art - and what business book these days would be complete without a blog. Some of you may have noticed that I've been very quietly blogging about this subject at CauseWired.com over the last month or so. Well, I'm going public today - the fourth anniversary of my personal blog - and I hope to see you all over there.

A note: this blog is not going dark - it will remain active, but I just won't post as often as I have been (this presidential race is confounding my attempts to beat the book deadline, I can tell you). And as I've said in each of the last three "anniversary" posts: I owe you all a hearty thanks for your time, your attention, your loyalty, and your vicious mud-slinging.

The Giants Win the Pennant!

I haven't been a huge football fan since Roger Staubach retired to a real estate empire and major Republican donor status, but who couldn't love the Giants' upset win on the frozen tundra of Green Bay (to quote the late, great Art Rust, Jr. one more time)? Reeling from Merrill Lynch's $10 billion loss and the sure-fire disaster year for all of Wall Street, New York's looking into another economic abyss the size of the 1970s. So the Giants' trip to the Super Bowl is a much-needed elixir for this town, a spot of flaming rum punch against the drab winter afternoons. The game itself was one of those rare classics, set at minus-4 degrees with the cold smoke of a northern plains January shimmering from mouths and noses.

Watching from the comfort of my modest room, I worried for Tom Coughlin's skin, Archie Manning's fatherly pride, and kicker Lawrence Tynes' sanity. Yet they pulled it out, forcing me to record the first of the epic Jane Austen series on PBS, Northanger Abbey, on my handy PVR, for viewing at another time. Now, in two weeks, the Super Bowl, with the undefeated - but hideously-uniformed - Patriots versus our Giants (yes, I'm the bandwagon now). And with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at half-time, I can close my eyes, listen to the music, and pretend old Roger the Dodger will be lining up another Navy jump-pass against the Steel Curtain back in the late 70s.

Speaking of that formative decade, what wonderful news that Jim Wolcott has agreed to write a memoir of his days stage-side at CBGB and other sordid venues, and for none other than Gerry Howard, boarding as he put it, "a graffiti-choked IRT train into the untamed past."

For more on the Jints, take a ride into my untamed pass by reading the terrific Giants blog penned by my one-time sports editor Ernie Palladino of the Gannett Westchester papers. Back in the day when my prose was thin and my waistline thinner, Ernie was the gruff, elder statesman on a late-night sports desk in White Plains, tossing out baseball columns and wisdom about deadlines with both authenticity and profane humor. He must have been all of 30 at the time, but he reminded me of those black and white movie Marine sergeants played by Van Heflin cursing about those God-damned college boys.

I mentioned earlier that the New England uniforms are horrendous, especially given the quality of the team. Yesterday's Giants-Packers tilt at Lambeau showed what good sports design is all about, combining nostalgia and the record book with rock 'em, sock 'em action in high-def. For more on NFL style - and uniforms of all shapes and sizes - there is no more obsessive blog than UniWatch, the Project Runway of professional sports, presided over the Paul Lukas, who captured yesterday's living color tableau (another Rustian term) perfectly:

Could any true football fan of a certain age who watched the Packers/Giants game last night honestly say that their enjoyment wasn’t keenly heightened by the mere sight of those two iconic uniforms doing battle against the freezing backdrop of Lambeau Field? The way the colors and logos so vividly hearkened to championship games played by these same two teams in the NFL’s glory years lent an inescapable air of nostalgia to the contest and a powerful sense of the sport’s past being present, a feeling that all too often seems lacking in this day and age of the league’s generally wretched marketing aesthetic.

A Mythical Concept of Time

II must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963

Confederates Lose, Repeat 1865 Disaster

Mike Huckabee's cynical embrace of the Confederate battle flag in the waning days of the South Carolina Republican primary campaign didn't work - and he lost both the primary to an ascendant John McCain and his mantle of easy-going, nice-guy moderate conservative.

Laughably described by modern-day Nathan Bedford Forrest wannabes like Patrick J. Buchanan (who I like to listen to, by the way, in my own train-wreck watching Imus mode) as a "heritage symbol," the flag most Americans know as the Stars and Bars was resurrected by segregationists in the 1950s to fly about statehouse around the south. Everybody knew why it went up. Everybody knew what it meant - and to whom.

The flag is a symbol of white power, of segregationist propaganda dressed up as states rights and local rule, a Klan standard over South Carolina. And Huckabee held it to his heart in a desperate attempt to roll right of the centrist-leaning McCain, so often derided by a Republican In Name Only by the hardcore party faithful and left for dead after daring to buck the nativist, Mexican-hating strand of conservatism. So Huckabee was stripped bear, laid out as one of those old-timey Johnny Reb traitor types. The Nation got it right:

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," the former governor of Arkansas told a crowd in Myrtle Beach, where he was campaigning in advance of the state's Republican primary on Saturday. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

In Florence, he told his supporters that, "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn't matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag -- you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole."

Exactly when are political reporters going to acknowledge that the candidate they have presented to America as a charming, good-humored "nice guy" is running a "southern-strategy" campaign so extreme in its sensibilities, themes and language that it would have embarrassed George Wallace?

Ah, but the Confederates always lose in the end, don't they? And these days, the Glorious Cause can't get you over the hump in South Carolina.

In other news, Aaron Burr wins Nevada 51-45 despite the wildly strange protestations of an ungracious Thomas Jefferson.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison - Obama?

The messianic quality of the argument for Barack Obama knows no bounds. Oprah famously (or infamously, depending upon your view) anointed him "the one" in South Carolina's mass rally, in more modern semi-secular shades of Billy Graham and Father Coughlin. The candidate himself identifies with two iconic martyred Kennedys - Jack and Bobby (I'm guessing he leaves Ted for Hillary) - Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King, and The Gipper. Campaign insiders whisper that the Gandhi media roll-out is timed for Florida.

Now along comes pop historian Joseph Ellis, who claims in today's L.A. Times that Senator Obama is pretty much the kind of candidate that - sorry, my hands shake with the effects of belly-laughter as I try and write this - the Founding Fathers would have approved of. Yes, Ellis (whose books I enjoy) gives the psychic endorsements of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison to Obama '08.

Alively debate has developed in these pages and in the blogosphere about the viability of Barack Obama's politics of hope. Critics of Obama's promise to bring us together -- blue states and red, young and old, women and men, blacks and whites -- have described his vision as a naive pipe dream that would be dead on arrival if he were elected president.

Central to the critique is the claim that Obama's message flies in the face of U.S. history, that partisanship is, as one critic put it, "the natural condition of politics." Zero-sum, "I'm right, you're wrong" battles are fundamental to the republic. From the beginning of our history, so the argument goes, an Obama-like message has been a rhetorical veneer designed to obscure the less-attractive reality of irreconcilable division and an inherently adversarial party system.

While you can certainly marshal evidence to support this interpretation, very few of the so-called founding fathers (save perhaps Aaron Burr) would agree with it. And the first four presidents -- George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- would regard it as a perversion of all that they wished the American republic to become.

Quick aside: Did you catch that sly Aaron Burr reference - wonder who he was aligning the killer of Alexander Hamilton, the would-be emperor of the west with? Senator Clinton's been called many things in this campaign - but Aaron Burr? That's a new one.

In any case, young Professor Ellis seems just as inebriated with the spirit of Obama's rhetoric as many other sensible Americans, taking leave of his senses in pursuit of some short-seasoned myth of hope fashioned around a talented but entirely conventional machine politician from Chicago. But there he is, book-ending the Audacity of Hope with the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution (I kid you not), and making perhaps the most over-the-top declaration about Obama yet:

His message has roots in our deepest political traditions. Indeed, it is in accord with the most heartfelt and cherished version of our original intentions as a people and a nation.

In the course of his brief hagiocolumn, Ellis admits out loud that perhaps - perhaps?! - Jefferson isn't worthy of a comparison to Barack Obama.

Jefferson is somewhat tricky on this score, because he, along with Madison, did create the first political party, known initially as Republicans but -- this is tricky too -- soon to morph into Democrats. But Jefferson could never admit, even to himself, that he was a political partisan because it violated the core definition of republicanism (i.e. res publica, public things) and the central political legacy of the American founding.

Yes, sadly, Jefferson and Madison did wallow in politics a bit - they may not be on Obama's non-partisan level. I can see that. (Remember all those nasty pamphlets?) Though by gosh, they were good writers, and so is Obama.

Ellis, of course, knows better - but he's in the the throes of political lust, and not to be deterred from the silliest of bouquets. Barack Obama does this to people, and he is clearly the most talented politician to yet emerge from his (and my) generation. Yet outside of perhaps Washington himself, both the founding brothers (as Ellis eloquently dubbed them) and  the Obama campaign actually share a love for the political fight, for the grasping at for high office, for expansive rhetorical flourishes riding like fluffy cumulus clouds thirty-thousand feet above the more hardscrabble landscape where people actually live.

Jefferson and Adams? Two brilliant careerist talents who took great risks - and both vicious political fighters of their day, the former in the more passive-aggressive style of Obama and the latter in the aggressive-aggressive style of Hillary Clinton.

But then again, I guess I'm too jaded. You know, I'm backing Aaron Burr this cycle.