And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver."

And, likewise, I'm sure Obama supporters are convinced what he offers will result competent execution of the change this country desperately needs.

I understand the conventional wisdom dialog being addressed here, but my two cents is simply that I find Clinton's life, experiences, approach to politics and policy, etc. 100 times more inspirational than Obama's.  Her rhetoric too.

Obama's rhetoric would also be inspirational to me on it's own merits, if it wasn't for this sinking feeling I get that I would be called a bad person if I said it might not be.

He defied the two-term tradition, and, some say, might have come to view himself as president for life.

who says? be nice if she was just a tad more specific. of course, that might require hard work. for all i, and you know, no one says any such thing, she just made it up because it sounds good.

So, when I point that out to Obama supporters, and ask how he would bring about more change than Clinton, talk turns to him being a less divisive figure, and a more inspirational leader, who will get a bigger mandate and thus can get things done. Obama himself has acknowledged in interviews that this is how he sees it too.

So, his personality is a very essential part of the package.

I was on a committee to search for a slate of candidates for Bishop.  When we got down to the next to final round, we were sent out in teams to the churches of the various candidates.

I pulled one from the south.  Our team met not only with parishioners but with people outside the church including the Mayor of the city.  The town had a racial divide that had been going nowhere with sharp conflicts between politicians and non-political community leaders.  The pastor of this church invited all to a series of monthly lunches at the church.  After a year of meetings, the two in the most contentious of relationships - a city council member and a community leader suddenly found something in common and the whole nature of the relationship between the politicians and the community leaders began to change.

The mayor said that the pastor was the first person he called when there was trouble - for instance, when a white policeman killed an African American teen-ager.  

The mayor also said - which relates to the point about Johnson and King - that the pressure that the pastor puts on the city administration is crucial to developing a safe and peaceful society.  The mayor said:  "There are people in this city who don't want anything to change.  Without a voice to counterbalance that and put pressure on the government to do better, nothing would change and we would be at a standstill."

For 232 years little boys have been told they could grow up to be anything they wanted, even President of the United States.

For 232 years that dream has been denied to little girls.

It took 190 years before a male dominated White House and Congress "gave" a female child in a 2 parent family the right to obtain a student loan without the signature of her father.

It took them 184 years before married women were "given" the right to sell property without the signature approval of their husbands -- even property they owned outright before their marriage.

It took them 144 years to "give" women the right to vote.

Medical research is still funded and dominated by trials based on male statistics. As a result, heart disease is the number one killer of women in America because science has only recently discovered the female signs of heart attack differ from the male.

Male students are still favored in dual gender classrooms at the expense of girl students who learn faster, earlier.

Male graduates are still awarded preference in being accepted to Big 10 universities.

The Equal Pay/Equal Work Act leaves the decision as to the value of a female employee up to the individual employer. The vast majority of businesses are controlled by men. As a result, women average only 72¢ for every $1 earned by a male counterpart doing the same job.

Electing a woman to the White House will prove a greater change, faster, in a more positive way, for the majority of Americans.

We don't need to love -- or even to like -- the personality of a candidate.

What we need is a better economy, better education, better healthcare, better opportunities, better paying jobs, and the personification of equality for all Americans.

Yes, Hillary Clinton might hit below the belt at times.

Older, more "traditional" Americans are the ones who vote in the greatest numbers. They are generally not going to vote for a black man with a Muslim name who recently arrived on the political scene.

Accounts of the campaign's "Camp Obama" sessions, to train volunteers, have a revivalist flavor. Volunteers are urged to avoid talking about policy to potential voters, and instead tell of how they "came" to Mr. Obama.

My view is that of Sean Wilentz who is, imo, our finest living historian.

He wrote a tremendous review of the most recent biography of Richard Hofstadter, which led to my first long discussion of Barack Obama published at this site in July 2006.

The Charisma candidate brings hubris. Take, FDR:

   And even for all their admiration of F.D.R., historians are quick to point out that soon after he had swept nearly every state in being elected to a second term, he tried to upend the constitutional separation of powers with a proposal to allow him to pack the Supreme Court by appointing up to six new justices (Congress wouldn't let him). He defied the two-term tradition, and, some say, might have come to view himself as president for life.

Thats funny this paragraph comes right after the Clinton supporter claims Obama is not FDR:

"To confuse this with Teddy Roosevelt or J.F.K. or F.D.R. is to make a fundamental historical error," he said. "It's confusing the offer of leadership with the offer of redemption. One offers specific programs, the other is hope and change. Certainly F.D.R. gave hope, but he was going to do it through these various programs."

 "Politics is about policy, but it's also about giving people some kind of sense of participating in a common venture with their fellow citizens," Mr. Wolfe said." (Alan Wolfe, the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Political Life at Boston College)

It's not just about giving us a sense of participating, it's about us realizing that whether change happens is fundamentally up to us.

It's up to us to put pressure on our leaders to move a policy forward by building social consensus around it. When a majority of people believe it is intolerable that there is no universal health care then politicians will be forced to bring it into existence. Otherwise, we risk waiting, maybe a very long time, until they see it as politically favorable for them to do it. In this sense, I feel there's a difference between Clinton and Obama. Clinton seems to believe it's all up to her. Obama seems to grasp that ultimately it's up to the citizens to organize and put unrelenting pressure on whoever is in the White House (him included) to get things done.

If Obama is able to use his tremendous charisma to beat McCain, and then to build a substantial democratic majority, will that be a bad thing?

No.

In an editorial in its latest edition, dated February 25, the liberal magazine The Nation has given its endorsement to Senator Barack Obama in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. ...

Hayes would have us believe that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were simply the product of the minds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, although they were endorsed in advance by the principal leaders of the Democratic Party, and funded for years by bipartisan congressional votes, with the support of the two finalists for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton. ...

A President Obama, whatever his antiwar rhetoric today, would find himself confronted by the same strategic imperatives that now face President Bush: American imperialism cannot withdraw from the Middle East and cede regional domination to Iran or allow other major powers--Russia, China, Japan, the European Union--to displace the United States.

The principal difference between Obama and Bush is of a tactical, not a principled, character. It is not over whether the United States must maintain access to oil and control of strategic territory, but over what methods should be used. Obama advocates a greater emphasis on diplomacy, economic penetration, covert action and political subversion, in combination with military force.

She can't go after his race, his church, or his policies without losing the black electorate in the general.

Republicans can and will remind the voters that he is an inexperienced black man with a chip on his shoulder who attends a radical black church and advocates policies that are socialist. They don't have to worry about losing the lefties and blacks, they were never going to get their votes anyway.

So keep cheerleading your messiah all the way to November but remember that the American electorate is totally different from those that participate in Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Obama is special, no doubt about it, and that is why I believe he will be the 44th president of the United States.

but I have seen too much and have lost some of my blind optimism...probably when RFK was shot.

I am glad to see that the youth has found some of the same things in Obama and if he is elected, he will have the awesome burden of having to deliver more than just soaring rhetoric.

The fact is, neither Obama nor Clinton are all that progressive. Obama has embraced many of former president Clinton's economic team (the one that gave us NAFTA) and then speaks out against NAFTA when in fact he is just as much a free trader, if not more so.

There is a simple metric...since joining the Senate, Hillary has impressed colleagues by getting involved in a wide variety of legislation and even worked with Republicans and Barack has accomplished little, though admittedly, he hasn't been there long.

I find it telling that he passed on a few votes like Kyl/Lieberman and the condemning of the 'Petreus' ad by MoveOn.org yet still felt justified in commenting on them nonetheless.