Maybe, however, people ought to focus on a different point.  Assume, as I do, that Obama agrees extensively with his wife and his long time pastor.  Then the significant point might be that he seems willing to rise above, to put aside, bitter if justified views, and to work for and seek common meeting grounds.  I know that I can’t and wouldn’t rise above and put aside the justified bitter views about what this too yahoo country has been and done.  As for other candidates, Hillary Clinton claims she wants to change things, but can’t even admit she ever made a mistake, and is a known dissembler for advantage, if not an outright liar like her husband.  Is that what you want for President?  As for McCain, he not only has done bad things when he thought it would help him (viz. the Keating business, joining Bush’s war by beating its drums in the last year or two), but proclaims that he will do more of the same -- the 100 year war, for example.  Is that what you want for President?  Especially when, as Bill Maher said, and as is so common in McCain’s (and my) generation, he seems to believe in war as the natural state of things. 

            So maybe the crucial point is not what Obama believes in his heart of hearts, but the fact that he seems willing to rise above what he thinks there, in the interest of a greater good.

* * * * *

            There is one thing, however, that Obama has never shown any sign of believing, but which one thinks essential.  It is not something any current candidate has ever given any sign of believing, although it is a lead pipe cinch America will never change in the long run without it.  The failure of change without it is a lead pipe cinch because, over the long run, America never has changed without it since the days of Jackson -- it never has changed without it despite the crookedness of the gilded age, of the 1920s, of the Johnsonian, Nixonian, Kissingerian days, of the Reagan Administration’s Iran Contra mess, of Bush II’s criminality, etc.  What I am speaking of is the necessity, alluded to earlier, that the people who lie, cheat, steal, rob the middle class, defy laws of war and American domestic law about war, be prosecuted, be put in the slammer, and go to the gallows, when and if found guilty of a crime.  Unless and until this starts being done, and I stress the need for the gallows when the crime warrants it, we will never be without major crooks, without causers of major disasters, in big business, in government, in economics and in war.  Indeed, people like this are preening now, are not so secretly delighted now, because they got rid of their nemesis Spitzer due to his own recklessness, stupidity, arrogance, unhappiness at home, or whatever it was that caused him to do things that were simply a disaster waiting to happen.  Nor has there been much comment on what seems to be the somewhat unusual steps taken by the FBI to insure (ala Don Riegelman and others?) that this thorn in the side of big business and Republicans be removed from public life. 

            The fundamental point remains that unless and until we start putting those who effed over scores of millions of us in the slammer for years on end -- and not in one of those federal hotel type slammers either, but in real slammers -- and unless and until we start sending the even worse criminal warmongers and torture mongers to the gallows, we will in the long run keep getting more of the same.  We will recoil from one disaster only to find ourselves facing a similar economic or warmongering disaster five or ten or twenty years from now.  As to the economic and business side of it, by now nobody needs persuading that one disaster can and does follow another.  As for the war mongering side, who, if he or she lived through Viet Nam, would have thunk it could happen again, yet Bush and Cheney and their fellow mental dwarfs saw to it that it did.

            Obama gives no sign about accepting, let alone believing, any of this.  Nor, being a practical politician, does he ever talk about it.  Nor, one is sure, does he want to talk about it lest yahoos have a field day on behalf of Clinton and McCain.  It is up to those who are willing to accept the Chicagoesque but non-American habit of truth and straight talk to keep pushing this, to push it so as to prepare the ground for it if and after Obama is elected, while hoping for such election because Obama does seem the only candidate likely to change much of the abhorrent in this country.  But a permanent shift away from the abhorrent -- here no less than in countries which once were dire threats to a decent world but now seem at least as good democracies as we are, if not perhaps even better ones, Germany and Japan -- will require prosecution and maximum punishment of those responsible for the criminal disasters.*