Because it wasn't my opinion this time? [cackle, cackle]

Honestly, I thought it was well written. There's a generational and a “cause” gap this year that's dividing the Dems. Note that while Obama's the newsmaker, the Clinton campaign, problem-ridden as it seems (many probably want it to have problems; they favor Obama or dislike Clinton the way I do), is still doing well and the smart money irrespective of the super-delegate problem is still on Clinton, though it really looks like Obama is doing well. Clinton vs. Obama is the most interesting thing we've seen in years and the two warring “camps” are of more interest to me than any Red Nation vs. Blue Nation tribal-warfare phenomena.

For example (from the article)

(Obama) “I think I'm very good at teasing out what the issues are from people who are smarter than me, and synthesising their arguments,” he said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal. His senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, confirms that. “He likes to bring in three or four people who disagree with each other. Then he'll have them debate while he quizzes them.” During a spat with Clinton in Las Vegas, Obama said, “I want to gather up talent from everywhere.”

In Obama one sees – as one never sees in Clinton – a catholic, open-minded intellect working in real time, and he seems admirably unashamed of his own uncertainty.

When he says, “I think…”, as he often does, you know he's really thinking. Obama offers the prospect of a first-among-equals administration, more flexible, more empiricist, more imaginative and less ideologically driven than any in recent history.

(Clinton) By contrast, remember how Clinton micromanaged her first healthcare plan to death in 1993, brooking no argument and taking no prisoners. Her superb grasp of policy details goes, unfortunately, hand in hand with a siege-mentality defensive centrism. Unlike Obama, she is certain to a fault. Where Obama wings it, she goes by the script.

When she made her concession speech in Des Moines after the Iowa caucuses, she was flanked by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright: a grimly prophetic tableau, I thought, heralding a return to the orthodoxy of the Democratic Leadership Council (“the Republican wing of the Democratic party”, as Howard Dean once called it), circa 1990 and to the poll-based politics of triangulation.

Two presidencies are in competition here: one driven from the bottom up, by a former community organiser; the other from the top down, by a combat-toughened former corporate lawyer. There are fundamental structural differences between the two campaigns and the two prospective administrations, but instead of focusing on them as we should, we're still fighting over dinner tables because one of the candidates is a white female and the other a black male.” – Jonathan Raban

“A few days ago I was at a dinner party of Seattle liberals – people who usually sing in tedious harmony on every issue from Iraq to the crying need for universal healthcare – when a small war broke out at the top of the table.

Recounting a conversation with a friend, a white woman said that, after so many decades of the struggle for women's rights, it was disheartening and unfair that Hillary Clinton's historic candidacy was in danger of being derailed by that of the first-term junior senator from Illinois.

As she spoke, I saw her neighbour, a retired black professor, staring grimly at his plate. Face averted from her, still looking down, he said: “Anyone – anyone – who equates the situation of women in this country with the struggle for civil rights by blacks is talking bullshit.” That was an utterly unexpected word from him – a man of graceful and formal manners – and the shock of it reverberated down the table.

I wondered how many leftish-leaning dinner parties across America were at that moment fracturing, like this one, along the lines of race and gender, not to mention the lesser ones of age and class. …”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentato…

*** A U S T I N *** Texas's liberal “oasis”