Obama Thoughts

Viscerally, perhaps even counter intuitively, I am feeling better about Obama's chances in the fall. For so long, he didn't seem real with his sui generis background and his plastic message of hope and change. But now -- battered, grabbed at, pulled down, knocked off balance, lumbered with a friend and pastor who is a kind of clown-genius -- he seems more real and less like a cartoon of virtues and undefined hopes.

The "man" is showing through, and I feel better about that. I think he can get down in the dirt and close the deal, a close election, dirty and stupid but still a win. I'm not saying he wasn't real before -- whatever real means. I'm just saying now he seems real in my subjective terms.

Hillary Clinton always seemed hyper-real to me because I know her. I am married to a kind of Hillary Clinton (absent any philandering on my part) who has spent her professional career in the company of rogues and fools (of both sexes) trying to do her best and willing to settle for the imperfection of what can actually get done because the world stops otherwise. I can see the appeal in Hillary Clinton, though I think she's a little too vivid for majority taste.

McCain is real, of course, caricature real, a living exaggeration done in big smudgy strokes, kind of comic. All good caricature (as opposed to a mere cartoon) is high-relief and finds some truth. My gut says it will be a close race -- a coin flip -- but Obama comes up heads more often than not.