And this display of Soft Power IS something of a chastisement — not only for the wielders of Hard Power, but also for people like me who sit around trying to figure out their motions and emotions.
Not sure what you mean by the future being “a lot more open than we thought.”

And not sure what you sense in the last paragraph — something ominous, you mean?
(Eg, Obama is a closet North American Unionist?) ???

In terms of transforming the political landscape, I’m thinking in two directions. The first is easy to feel but hard to pin down – a sense that the future just might be a lot more open than we thought. Time will tell, and trying to make predictions at this point would involve a category mistake.

The second is more concrete, though still just a notion. As I’ve watched Obama over the last year, I’ve had a sense that the presumptuous way of speaking of the U.S. president as “leader of the free world” could, in his case, take on a dimension that it didn’t have before. I don’t know what the long-term ramifications of this will be for the trajectory of the U.S. as a political unit. But I’m feeling, however much I wish I was part of the celebration over there, that this could be a pretty good time to be far out in the American diaspora.

It’s now possible for him to lose Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, and New Mex, Nevada and Colorado, and still win so long as he gets the northern midwesters and the three on the pacific coast.

Networks are calling Pennsylvania for BHO.

One of the big four or five question marks in the east. PA OH VA NC and FL.

Very hard for McPalin to win if indeed Pennsy has gone Obama.

I do agree the mandate is huge spiritually. And maybe spirit, for once, will matter.

As for “transforming the political landscape” … I’ll wait and see.

Certainly the internet has transformed campaign technique. That’s a revolution. Beginning in 2004 with the Dean campaign.

But politics per se … Reason to think things haven’t changed much since the democracy of Athens collapsed after a misadventurous war into a series of incompetent tyrannies.  One of which put Socrates to death for corrupting the youth with critical conversation.

It’s just this darn deja vu … Harking back to 1992. When it seemed, finally, Reaganism had been banished.

This time it may be different, but thanks not to Barack as much as to the collapse of the finance system.

I hope, that is, for a double whammy that will stick: The death of Reaganism/Thatcherism/Neo-liberalism, on its own terms, while whatever precisely Team Obama will cook up has a chance to simmer.

I’ve been studying (again) the latest 60s Assassinations evidence and lore to come to light. The faux legal assault on Clinton, right out of the gate — a right-wing conspiracy for sure if less than vast — was assasination of a spiritual sort. The monsters have grown subtle.

I wish BHO had taken Hillary along as VP — to serve as effective (physical) assassination insurance. If he succeeds in making effective policy and making it stick, two or three years hence V.P. Biden (whom I admire) may seem an invitation to the murderous unpatriotic crackpots and militarists among us.

Dog bless and speed President Obama through his trial.