hope springs eternal

[updated to include the Frank Luntz link and quote; they got lost in the ether when I first published this post earlier today, Jan 8]

Hope is good. Change is good.

Those pieces of conventional wisdom are driving Obama’s surge. I feel it, too, even as I feel sorry for Hillary Clinton (who’s feeling sorry for herself). There’s only one problem:

Hope is ephemeral—here today, gone tomorrow. If feels good while it lasts. But to build a future on the foundation of hope is to ask for misery when its promise goes unfulfilled.

What is Obama’s program for “change”? I wonder.

I voted for George McGovern.

I voted for Jimmy Carter.

I voted for Bill Clinton, twice.

I voted for Al Gore.

God help me, I voted for Walter Mondale.

I am loath to admit this, but I even voted for John Kerry.

Obama speaks particularly to those who believe that America has gone astray under George W. Bush. There are a lot of people in that category, and you can find them across the entire political spectrum.

On the right (nominally) there’s David Brooks, who has had a man crush on Obama for quite a while now, and of course Andrew Sullivan, who is in a category by himself and apparently unembarrassable.

On the left, there are many. Here’s one of the more sober voices:

[Obama] presents this election as a continuum, from the minuteman to the abolitionists, to the union movement, to the greatest generation to the civil rights workers to today. We look back at the Revolutionary War and the ending of slavery and the defeat of fascism and the civil rights movement as great moments in American history; because they represent times when Americans not only affected change, but made a concerted effort to ensure that this country lived up to its founding ideals. Obama is selling the idea that America can produce that type of change again, but only if Americans are willing to take the leap of faith and believe that it’s possible. Indeed, this notion of believing is the climactic element of his stump speech.

In order to fall for Obama, part of you has to believe that America is lost, that it has stumbled badly, that it has strayed far from its purpose and mission, that it has sinned unconscionably and must be saved. I don’t subscribe to that notion. Unconsciously, however, Hillary is giving Obama the advantage among people who believe that America is “fallen.”

Last week, she said:

“But after seven long years of this administration, we finally have the opportunity for a new beginning.

There’s a conundrum here that she can’t escape. She has put her finger on what the Dem base wants, but the Dem primary voters (and others) seem to see the solution in Obama, not in her.

Tough luck, but it’s an insular problem for the Democrats. At the moment, we’re witnessing a Democratic soap opera. It’s excellent as entertainment.

Frank Luntz, pollster extraordinaire, is jazzed:

Luntz called 2008 the “most undecided, most fluid” election he’d seen in his lifetime. “I’m so lucky I get to study it. People wait for 50 years to have an election like this.”

Last night, Mickey Kaus was hoping that both of his pet theories might pan out:

If Romney pulls off a N.H. win after really only turning around in the Fox debate Sunday night, it will be a stunning confirmation of both the Feiler Faster Thesis and Jerry Skurnik’s theory that because uninformed voters are more uninformed than ever they only learn enough to actually make up their minds very close to the Election Day. …

Crazy times, folks.