BTW, I want to mention one fundamental basis of the otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm that surrounds Obama that I don't think has been mentioned yet even though it seems obvious and I think everyone knows about it: the deep emotional antagonism that exists between Democratic primary voters and the party apparatus they feel continually betrays them.
It's an antagonism that is almost as empty as it is strongly felt.
Empty because it never amounts to anything. It's always the same drama with the same ending: the upstart candidate enthuses the crowd, then either dies out in the early running, and the primary voters who were calling for the head of the mainstream candidate comes back and obey the party elders because they've got no other choice. It's like a quadrennial adolescent rebellion.
Empty because there's no reason to expect anything else. As Adolph Reed has put so well so many times, you don't change the political course of the nation by voting for president. The whole idea that the reason we're in this position because the party apparatus is betraying the left is an attempt to blame them for our weakness and failings and magical thinking. The only way the establishment will ever budge is through the threat of mobilized popular force. And that happens outside presidential primaries.
And empty because the candidates so embraced are never much different than the one chosen by the party machine. Bill Bradley? Howard Dean? They both had just as little in their policies to justify the progressive enthusiasm projected upon them as Obama does now. In fact, they actually both resemble Obama in key respects. Howard Dean was as much an anti-war candidate as Obama is. And Bill Bradley was as much a domestic progressive as Obama is.
But precisely because these candidates always die out, this emotional desire to rebel, to have the primary mean something, this desire to cause something with their vote, never gets a satisfying expression.
And the difference with Obama is that he's not dying out. So this huge desire that's been frustrated for decades is on the verge of finally being satisfied in the hugest of ways (because you can't conceive of a more party- establishment candidate than Clinton).
You can see how that would make people flush up and swell until they were just about to burst.
Then maybe afterwards they'll be sad,(1) just like they would in an alternative universe where Dean or Bradley won. Because of course in the harsh light of the morning after, it's pretty obvious that Dean wouldn't have been any more progressive than Kerry, or Bradley than Gore.
But while it would have zero effect on policy (or least zero predictable effect), the result of the "progressive" candidate winning in any of those races might well be a stronger fall campaign and a more solidified party.
The former because if the progressive wing feels they've won for the first time in history, they'll be more enthusiastic in ringing doorbells. And because the establishment side knows they haven't lost, they'll pipe in just as much money.
The latter because maybe like with Reagan or Kennedy the illusion will persist. In which case, the wing and the mainstream of the Dem party will be for once as united in supporting "their" government as the mainstream and the wings of the Republican party were under Reagan.
FWIW, FBOW.
Michael
(1) That's a Latin joke for Shagcopula.