This Hope Thing is Rather Audacious

These right-wing years in America pass through our collective urethra like a political kidney stone. But the prognosis is good: in a few months, the pain may be over.

Respecting the Irony Gods, we cannot dwell on a future with President Obama without acknowledging the distinct possibility of President McCain. President McCain would be a profound national disaster not because of the man's personal history, but rather his present weakness in wholly accepting the influence and power of the same soft-shell fascists mismanaging America today: you can expect more Constitution-gutting justices, more erasure of the national identity in favor of corporate identity, a bigger sandbox for the military-industrial complex, and of course, lots of long and pointless war.

But the polls, while far from overwhelming, are consistently promising enough that my suspicion is that a man who can best the Clintons at the height of their power and influence in the Democratic party is going to find beating McCain only an interesting challenge, like a man who had just killed a Siberian tiger with a stick having to fend off a wolverine.

You do still have to be careful. I believe the Obama campaign will be able to handle whatever GOP 527 attacks are being booked for airtime as we speak, and take advantage of the rebound.

But that is all the kind of speculation that is hard to avoid when you've been too gooped up with political media.

The morning's question is: with decade after decade of the American right-wing exhausting even our considerable mock and scoffing capacities, the possibility now exists that things might get better, not just politically, but substantively.

It was that line in Obama's primary victory speech: "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." People caught that line, and I think it's quietly freaking them out.

He might mean it. That's the freaky part. What if we actually tried to save our planet?

The ability to build mass movements is Obama's most essential skill, and he might be starting to deliver, if he can build an organization capable of building and maintaining large organizations to create strong political power for progressive policy at any number of levels. A successfully organized shift toward even a moderate but honest progressive policy would be hard over on the wheel; I sense that the possibility exists of the spark of inspirational nationalism from Kennedy with elements of the government-based broad social movements of the New Deal.

There is a bit of fear here too. Creating new political power is by nature fat with potential for abuse. So the question becomes whether the government Obama would build would earn and sustain a sense of trust to follow the impressive call to honor the law and substantive political and ultimately cultural principles of the Constitution. (If you've never heard 20,000 people cheering wildly for restoring Habeus Corpus, I suggest you try it- I was standing close enough to see Obama taken a little aback by the reaction.)

Which leaves those of us Left of crypto-fascist with an uncharacteristic situation - how will we conduct ourselves after decades of reinforcement that the most acidic skepticism is insufficient to describe the mendaciousness, greed, and incompetence of the dominant forces in our government?

What if it isn't, anymore?

In talking around recently, I get the interesting sense of progressives getting uncomfortably yanked out of our dockside cynicism, poking their feet gingerly into a skiff, confused by the possibility of actually getting on the water, our attention directed to the storms already headed our way.

It is as if I had just been unexpectedly handed an oar, and asked whether I can think of anything good to do with it.