ANDREW SULLIVAN tells a truth worth repeating:
In the midst of this, we have a domestic politics that has become poisonously polarized by the cumulative impact of two decades of Dick Morris, Karl Rove-style politics and have lurched from one president whose every sentence was a carefully parsed legalism to one often in total denial about the reality he grapples with. We desperately need not some kind of new politics, but a return to reasoned politics, to leaders who, even when they disagree, can rationally explain how and why. Americans know we have deeply serious problems and are tired of deeply unserious posturing. Republicans have grasped this. That's why they actually rejected the most polarizing (Giuliani) and cynical (Romney) and facile (Huckabee) candidates, in favor of a serious man, who is at least open to opposing arguments and engaged in more than partisan hucksterism and nasty minority-baiting.
The Democrats, so far, have as well. Obama is simply more capable, more trustworthy, more reasonable and less partisan than Clinton. That's all. He is not a messiah, for Pete's sake, and I'm tired of being told that those of us who support him are somehow irrational or emotional. Above all, he will not breathe new life into the very pathologies with which we have all been consumed for too long. She will. Some of this is her fault; some of it isn't. I see my own attempt to move forward constructively impeded by the emotions she and her husband have the power to evoke. But her partisanship and divisiveness are not in my mind alone. She knows what she's doing - and, in my view, we cannot afford her any more.
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