That's the year that was

Wind up the media top

For next year's big buzz

And I don't think I've yet met anyone who's ever got everything right about anything, let alone many with the humility to dissect themselves and their (precious few) "mistakes" so publicly.

Even when you got something wrong it's only because hindsight is 20/20. You were right in stating what you believed at the time you believed it, no matter how many of us idiots might have been screaming otherwise and, thanks to the law of averages, may have been right on some of the things that turned out differently than you expected. That's not really "wrong."

It is this, and the fact that I still trust not only my own judgement enough to let myself outside during daylight hours (and that I still trust Obama's remarkable political acumen as well) that I think you may well be "wrong" about the choice to put Rick Warren on the inaugural program. But you won't have been "wrong" regardless: you'll simply have told us how you feel about it, and that's what you've done resolutely over the course of this utterly unlikely and highly unpredictable (by any known standard) election year.

Thanks, Joan. This is awesome.

President Obama will have a difficult time. He's certain to have a lot of problems to solve.

My guess is that he will be only partly successful.

Instead of getting upset about Rev Warren, I'd suggest hoping that Obama will do well.

His win is much due to David Axelrod who will be with Obama in the White House.

Right now, the activity of David Plouffe is under the radar screen. Neither you nor any other commentator is paying any attention to David Plouffe.

The comments from Peter Yarrow should be on every front page. Please take a shot at that.

Thank you, AJCalhoun, I really appreciate that. And thank you, too, klytus -- did you see you were namechecked? I was afraid I would embarrass you, but...it's all about the truth-telling.

It's always better to be on the right side of history than the wrong side, and from that perspective the need for this confessional makes sense (although the overall tone is a bit heavy in the hectoring, judgment and superiority departments. e.g. even when I'm wrong I'm sort of, well, right, you crazy Obama zealots).

As one of the early Obama zealots myself, I do take issue with a Walsh stratagem, on display here: the idea that the yawping of individual bloggers or blogging communities serve as a representative sample of the larger body politic and conclusive evidence of anything at all. Luckily the Obama story is bigger than bloggers and the MSM. Obama has higher approval ratings going into office of any president-elect in modern history. Those poll numbers just don't square with your notion of fading support among most Obama supporters - Chris Bowers and Tom Hayden notwithstanding - and in fact suggest exactly the opposite.

PS - Given that the year is about to end, indulge me a final: GOBAMA!

Basically everything the Salon blogerati and all their minions complained about or threw their panties onstage about turned out to be either irrelevant or wrong.

"I worried that Obama might never figure out how to appeal to working-class Democrats."

Um, you forgot a word there. Because, after all, plenty of working-class Democrats voted for Obama from the beginning. They just weren't a member of the group designated by the word you left out.

It's the same word Ms. Clinton used when describing this group, when she engaged in what many people, including myself, believed was calculated race-baiting.

The word, of course, is "white." Unless you believe somehow that "working-class" excludes black people, just as many conservatives use the word "Southerner" to mean "white Southerner."

Try it this way:

"I worried that Obama might never figure out how to appeal to white working-class Democrats."

There now. That's more what you meant, isn't it?

It's always good to see how many people can recognize a bandwagon.

Joan's chronicle of her changing opinion about Obama as the campaign progressed very closely matched mine, and I suspect a lot of Democrats who didn't start out supporting the big O. I also felt Obama wasn't ready at the start of the campaign, especially versus the more hardened, seasoned and possibly smarter Clinton; I thought he was a little too taken with his own speechifying abilities; and that he was no more progressive than Clinton, (and I agree with Joan that had Obama been a sitting U.S. Senator in the Fall of 2002, he very possibly might also have voted for the AUMF against Iraq as did most of the Democratic Senate leadership).

When the debates began, I too was fuming that Obama wouldn't hit McCain back as hard as it appeared McCain was hitting him, only to be pleasantly surprised that Obama had figured out that the majority of voters didn't want to see another tough guy acting out--after 8 years of that garbage voters apparently wanted a calm and deliberative person who appeared to be thinking beyond glib talking points.

Lastly, Joan's point that Obama can learn on the fly is spot on--Hillary beat him up in the early debates in the Fall of 2007, but by the time the field had dwindled to just Barack and Hillary, Obama was going toe to toe with the highly skilled debater Clinton, and bloodying her repeatedly. I voted for Hillary in the primary, but I have no doubt now that Obama richly deserves the prize he has won.

I mean this as a compliment; that was fair and balanced.

When it comes to politics, I think one of the major currents that we are all having difficulty navigating these days is the way the media, indeed our entire culture, underscore politics as being increasingly about personality and celebrity and less about governing and consequences. The apotheosis of this, I believe, was the election of George W. Bush, someone plainly unsuited for governing but "likable enough" to (almost) a majority of Americans. The consequences of his elections were predictable and, I believe, fairly predicted. But too many of my fellow citizens saw what they wanted to see -- something that conveniently left the driving to others and celebrated the status quo of white male upper-class privilege.

So many of the shifting tides of our rapidly changing culture are being played out in projection onto public figures. It's bad enough that we do it with Jennifer Aniston -- but it's a mistake to subject our politicians to the vagaries of what we need to project on to them in order to understand or be comfortable with our world. The genuine sexism and racism that reared their heads during this campaign were too often obscured by our collective need to identify IT as a neatly defined Other -- rather than the persistent teas we've been steeping in from the get go. While these isms cloud our vision to one degree or another, I am hopeful that a lot of the uncomfortable unmasking of them we went through this year will help us take a decent step forward in this area.

There's something beautifully poetic about the fact that the one person who seemed to see through this nonsense from the get go was the man at the center of it all, the One too many of us were determined to see as we needed to see him. In hindsight, it's pretty comical that someone Tom Hayden thought of as practically reverse engineered to lead a great progressive revolution is actually someone who is Hayden's opposite; so low-key and practical that his plainly spoken centrism was assumed to be a mask. No, no, we insisted, what we projected onto him was the real Obama. It's amazing to me that, on top of his other eminent gifts, Obama is also someone who has learned to marshal what others expect of him into something useful he can expect from us.

For that matter, I cannot tell you what a relief it is to finally have someone in office who is clear-eyed about the enormous long-term challenges we face -- and reasonably honest about how he intends to overcome them. We probably can't get over mass projection any time soon -- but we seriously can't afford to continue to live out a Fantasy Island view of America, the world and what it's going to take to get from point A to point B.

Personally, I think that how Obama ends up employing us in his vision for change is going to be the key to whether his presidency is successful. Thus far, the tea leaves are good. If he remembers he's human -- and we do too -- he may just truly be the one we've been waiting for after all.

Thanks for a year of great commentary. No, you weren't always right -- but I always felt you were honest and open about where you were coming from and why.