I sympathize with your position and I respect it.

I would suggest, however, that part of Obama's premise is that terms like "progressive," "liberal," and the like are obsolete.

I'm not saying you should support Obama, just offering the perspective of one who shared your reservations for similar reasons.

For instance, one of the lessons Obama shared was of not being able to enact legislation in Illinois because of the lack of a genuine popular mandate to do so.

I believe the lesson he drew from this was that politicians can only do so much without a real mandate.

So I take those "right of center" positions to be starting points, not ultimate goals.

I truly believe that Obama wants to be pushed leftward, but wants to begin from a position of consensus, adopting the most "progressive" he can without courting controversy.

This is his centrism and his pragmatism. But like his contention that Wright's mistake was in presuming America was static, so I believe Obama's positions are not static. They are beginnings, not ends.

I support him because I believe his vision is ultimately way, way more "progressive" than is Clinton's, but that his approach is moving the entire country leftward and then securing concrete "progressive" boons whereas Clinton's approach is to fight for those boons rather than attempting to create a genuine popular mandate for them.

I think both approaches are legitimate, but Obama's rings truer to me.

Again, not trying to shill, just offering my perspective.

Thank you, Kate.

Understandably.

You're free to feel nervous and I'm sure there's nothing I can say to allay that nervousness.

Again, I was suspicious of Obama for months, so I understand.

But he's managed to convince me, over those months, that, despite his vagueness (because of it, even?), his upside is limitless.

Simply put, I trust him.

Not blindly, to be sure, but I trust him as much as I can imagine "trusting" a politician. I believe in his vision, it's that simple.

His analysis always rings true to me and that's important to me. He has correctly (more or less) diagnosed this country's ills. One example, out of many, is his line about wanting to end not just the war, but the mentality that got us into the war.

He's talking about a society of fear and xenophobia and knee-jerk militarism, etc., etc., etc.

His "We the People" speech correctly noted the divide and conquer scheme that stifles a progressive agenda. Exploit race, cultural issues (homosexuality, abortion, religion, etc.) to drive people apart so they're more concerned with these things than schools and health care. It's really that simple, as I see it, and it works.

Obama is attempting to break that model of politics and (correctly, in my view) understands that until that is done, we'll just be dicking around about nonsense ad infinitum. And so it goes.

I don't view him as the Second Coming, by any means, but in short, it's clear to me that he gets it.

Clinton, on the other hand, believes the country's ills to be about Bush, which to me reveals a dangerous lack of perspective.

All that said, I understand that many people are uncomfortable with what they consider Obama's vagueness.

To them, I would invite them to think a bit more macro and then ask whether he still seems vague.

Because to me, his analysis is trenchant. Nothing vague about it.

I neglected to mention that I never liked Bill, basically, because I thought he did the Republicans' work for them.

So to me, the Clintons are implicated in this country's problems, in that they sold out the liberal agenda and legitimated the conservative ethos time and time again.

(Joycelen Elders and Lani Guinier spring to mind.)

We can disagree about the Clinton legacy, but it's probably important for me to put that out there: I despised the Clinton administration.

Not upstate, Yonkers. But thank you!

To elaborate, I came up in the 1980s during which bussing was a bitterly divisive issue, breeding deep animosities and violence all around. Yonkers was basically an outer-borough type place, working class, segregated (balkanized, even), extremely diverse. Irish, Italian, Jewish, black, hispanic, Polish, etc.

I've experienced enough racial and economic tension and strife to last me a lifetime, thank you very much.

This is why Obama's message appeals to me.

Oh my God, how harrowing. I'm so sorry you had to experience that.

That's Yonkers, for you. Violence all around. My experience there was similar, though I grew up on the other side, near Sarah Lawrence, Cross County and Bronxville. Bottles and taunts thrown from cars, harrassment on the street, harassment from cops, you name it.

It really was a broken place, filled with suffering, resentment and acting out.

"BUT - there is a value to it. The whole thing is a big pressure cooker, designed to bring out the real person. No one can "fake it" for the entire span (W is an exception, but he had practice as a spoiled rich kid being transplanted to Texas). The real person usually comes out - qualities and flaws."

Au contraire, mon ami! He faked nothing.

Remember when he mocked that woman whose death sentence he refused to commute?

Tucker, was her name?

It would be nice if we could attribute America's voting for him to some kind of deception.

No, I'm afraid America saw just who he was and still voted for him.

And did so again in 2004.

"That's America."

"The president's primary job is as a legal figure. He vetoes legislation and signs legal documents for the entire country."

That's an interesting hypothesis, one that I've not heard before.

It doesn't ring true to me off the bat, but you've given me something to chew on, so thank you for that.