The vast majority of voters will enter the voting booth and for the first time in their lives they will have to decide whether to pull the lever for a black man. For many, this will be a very personal choice based on their personal experiences among other things and the results will be all over the map. It is a total crapshoot. We may find that the Dems will suffer losses in areas that they normally do very well with the hope that these losses will be made up someplace else. One example that comes to mind is the Hispanic voter, which is ordinarily a democratic "slam-dunk", but will Hispanics vote for a black man in great numbers?. Who knows. This is why Hillary was (and probably still is) the more favored candidate to beat McCain because she draws better from the existing democratic base than McCain would draw from the traditional repub base. Young women would probably have put HRC over the top. Think 1996 when Dole lost to Bill. Bill had Dole boxed-in where he could only draw from the most traditional of repub bases.

Because HRC is out of the picture, McCain is feeling much better about his chances because he can now go freelancing into certain areas and demographics that Bush or Dole would never have dared to go and not get a pie in the face. Why? Because people want to check out the "other guy" one last time before pulling the lever for a black man to be POTUS.

Joan,

Anyway you slice it, HRC will be remembered for wishful thinking about Obama's untimely demise and Obama will be remembered for his "pastor disaster". Both of these events are the product of the MSM. Over time, Obama can "distance" himself from his whacky pastor but how does HRC distance herself from these remarks? It's like some well-known celeb going off on Jews or blacks. It is very difficult to wash your hands after something like this. And what did she really mean by them? I have not heard an adequate explanation. Plus RFK's 40th anniversary of his assassination comes up next week, so we will be remind all over again about her comments.

Thus far, nobody has come out and defined exactly what "change" is except to say that it is the opposite of Bush, which won't work in the general election. This vagueness was a useful strategy for Obama during the primaries because it deliberately lacked substance and meaning. He knew that educated elites would interpret his notion of change in a way consistent with his values, etc. and they posed no threat. Therefore, there was no real downside risk to the notion of "change" for change sake because everybody knew what he meant. Now, fast-forward to the fall and the notion of change is going to be interpreted differently by some (or many) as favoring blacks and minorities over equally entitled whites in the Obama presidency and this is where Obama has to sharpen his message or he will likely lose.

Obama must retool his message for the fall election in ways that McCain does not have to or run the risk of being blown-out in November strictly on the basis of a conflation of "change" and "racial politics". His choice of VP will be interesting because it will point to how he plans to control the agenda for "change". People and the media will not give him the benefit of the doubt on his change agenda if it appears that his first major decision was motivated race or gender. In response to this I think he will pick John Edwards as VP so he can continue to push for real change and not get ambushed by the Repugs as pandering. On the other hand, picking a woman or a Hispanic as VP, as some have suggested he will do, would signal that his notion of "change" must mean primarily racial or identity politics in this country.

Everything in this piece makes all the sense in the world and includes appropriate academic references, but then again a black man is at the top of the ticket, and who the hell knows whether people will pull the lever for a black man.

Joe,

Your smug assessment of the ending of the Vietnam War does not consider the possibility that the prolonging of the Vietnam war until 1975 MAY have caused the USSR and China to open up to the West sooner rather than later and eventually causing the USSR to collapse, sooner rather than later. If the US left Vietnam in 1962 and became "peaceful" as opposing communism, maybe the USSR would still be in business today.

Glenn,

Give it a rest. I can see you don't get out often. You have been bombing us with this telecom crap for 6 months now and, quite frankly, nobody cares. Even Obama doesn't care. And that ought to be enough to just drop it. Reminds me of Whitewater or WhatWater. I can't even recall what Whatwater was even about, only that it never ended and became a "big yawn". Your arguments are so obscure that the political establishment's eyes glaze over, not to mention the 99.5% of the voting public who have no understanding of the historical role of FISA and the Church Committee.

Hey, how about a nice long, really long, piece on how our telecom prowess helping snatch Ingrid Bentacourt and the other 15 or so guys out of the jungles of Colombia after 5 years of captivity. Now that is a really interesting story how the Bushies did something really cool with the help of all those military techie types who can track stuff from 300 miles up. But you and Salon won't touch this story because it both glorifies the military and the centrist Uribe regime and utterly humiliates the lefty FARC crowd, who have been decimated by our technical eavesdropping abilities. I suppose you don't want to compete with the Sunday Parade Magazine or Readers Digest.