Goodby to All That

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE that I haven't read this staggering essay till today? I mean: really. It's not like I don't post from or link to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish on a regular basis since I caucused in Maine, which was precisely at the same time I saw why Obama matters.

But, alas, what's true is true. Better late than never. If you haven't read it yet, you simply must. It all leads to this ending:

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

See how Sullivan gets there.