In the wake of a momentous victory, Barack Obama, the Democrats, and the nation are at a watershed. Transformations that complement and deepen one another can happen in four momentous areas -- in race relations, in the economy and social contract, in America's place in the world, in our civic democracy and partisan balance. Much of the punditry we hear deals in false opposites and fails to grasp the propitiousness of this moment. Let's look at each part of Obama's challenge to see why he can accomplish complementary enduring and major changes in all these spheres.

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Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize is wonderful news. It appropriately honors his work as an economist -- and it will have the salutory effect of enhancing his impact as a public intellectual at a key juncture in US and world history. When it was not at all fashionable, we all need to remember, Krugman consistently spoke against the mendacity of the Bush administration. He correctly predicted the disasters in foreign and economic policy to which that administration's horrendous and corrupt decisions would lead. Bravo to him -- and thanks to the Nobel committee.

Avoiding the spewing bile of McCain's dying campaign, I took a few days off to drive the backroads of New England looking for antiques. Yesterday, in the early morning light, I drove from Bethel, Maine down to Cornish on Route 5, reveling in one of the most beautiful Columbus Day weekends in many years. With lakes and the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the far vista, brilliant sunlight dappled through the fire red, orange, and yellow trees set off against the blue sky and omnipresent evergreens. Dappled light hit the white houses and churches and occasional small graveyards omnipresently nestled along Maine backroads, where life and death easily coexist.

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Every day until November -- and in person in next Tuesday's debate -- McCain and his people are going to raise one smear of Obama after another. Will Obama respond effectively and keep his lead? A lot is at stake here: the 2008 election and the future of American politics, its capacity to cut off the kind of vicious falsehoods that have worked so well in the past. Are we going to want to live in the kind of polity we will end up with if Obama fails to respond with sufficient strength and specificity?

Certainly Obama needs to keep the focus on major issues and talk directly to voters about their economic needs and concerns. In Tuesday's debate, he should do much less responding to McCain's agenda and mostly look at voters through the camera and speak of their real-life concerns. And he should ask voters practical questions -- such as "how will it be for your family to try to pay new taxes on your health plan, or deal with insurance companies that can deny you coverage if you get sick, or find a new plan costing $12,000 or more with less than half that much to spend?" If you cannot afford that on top of all the other rising costs and worries you face, then you cannot afford John McCain."

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Upon hearing the news of McCain's latest gambit -- campaigning/distracting by claiming to "suspend" his campaign and ditch the debate -- a friend of mine suggested it shows his racist attitude toward Obama, his unwillingness to accept him as an equal competitor. McCain has certainly repeatedly showed this disrespect throughout the campaign, and has often tried to insert himself as Obama's manager. But I responded to my friend that the real issue here is McCain's obvious disrespect for American democracy. He is running a campaign in which he and his ridiculously unqualified running mate refuse to answer press questions and confine their appearances to stage-managed events. Now, with a major event that would be partially unscripted and very telling on the horizion, McCain suddenly decides to appoint himself President and "go to Washington to resolve a pressing national crisis." Who does he think he is kidding? He is just trying to avoid laying out his views and taking questions so voters can evaluate him compared to Obama.

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Here is the message that needs to get across in TV ads, Obama's speeches, and Biden's and many surrogates' comments: America cannot afford ANOTHER President and VP who lie to us (just as Bush and Cheney have often done). Turn McCain's transgressions into an act of perfidy against the country, rather than just "playing unfair." Tie McC and Palin to Bush and Cheney and, at the same time, present them as a threat now and for the future.

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Every major media outlet has now reported that Sarah Palin is not telling the truth about her aggressive earmark-seeking and her support for the Bridge to Nowhere (until Congress cancelled it and she took the money for other projects). Now, today, the Washington Post gives us the amazing revelation that she routinely charged the State of Alaska for her living expenses while she resided at home, and charged family costs to the state when she traveled on (mildly) official business to burnish her personal image. This is the portrait of a liar and someone who milks the public for personal advantage. Regardless of legalities in a formal sense, Palin has a sleazy profile. She is no reformer.

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Tonight at Mile High will be extraordinary, I am sure; and I am so pleased that my twenty-year-old son Michael, heading the Brown Daily Herald news team, will be there to witness Obama's acceptance speech. But for me personally it would be hard to top last night at the Democratic Convention, listening to Bill Clinton and Joe Biden set the stage for Obama and bring the nation and the Democratic Party to the brink of the most important political watershed in the past four decades.

As Michigan State college students in 1966 and 1967, my hustand-to-become Bill and I met while working on a Civil Rights project in Mississippi. We participated in a small way in the fight for American fulfillment through the enfranchisement of blacks and in the repudiation of racial segregation that our generation helped to junp-start. Then, in 1968, we cried with millions of others when the hopes of the era took a dark turn after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. We watched as increasingly viscious right-wingers tore blacks from whites, and pitted the middle class against the less privileged -- all the while constructing a predatory U.S. state by and for the crassest of the super rich, and bringing our politics to a shameful nadir that McCain has now embraced, to his ever-lasting shame.

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The Obama-Biden debut in Springfield has just concluded and it is easy to see why Biden is the perfect Vice-presidential choice for this pivotal election. Both men spoke with passion, and their different yet convergent biographies nicely underline the theme of realizing and revitalizing the American dream for all citizens in a tough time, even as we recapture respect for the United States in the world. Their tableau in the home of Lincoln embodies powerful reverberations in the telos of American history.

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The last month has been excruciating for Obama supporters, watching him and his campaign squander so many hopes and resources on an utterly wimpy campaign. For me, the last straw was yesterday -- in the VFW speech when supposedly Obama was gettting tough against McCain's character assassination strategy -- to watch him speak like a soporific college professor, repeating McCain's charges at length, flattering McCain as honorable and patriotic, and then, finally, sort of begging McCain to take it back! Josh Marshall is totally right to call Obama out on this.

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In response to McCain charge that Obama is playing the race card, KEEP IT SHORT!:

"McCain is playing the Desperation Card again and again. They will say anything they can to keep the focus off the bad economy, the real struggles of America's families, and their lack of ideas to make things better. Barack Obama is going to keep talking about his plans to revive the American Dream for all of us."

Say this every day, to every distracting accusation. And run some ads about McCain/Bush's bad economic ideas.

Theda S.

In recent posts, Marshall and Gitlin are pointing to the increasing use of racial innuendo by the McCain campaign. This is their only route to victory, and there is little question that they have figured out how to do it well with minimally expensive ad buys that get the 24-hour media folks blabbering: presumptuousness, uncaring to troops, images of black candidate near beautiful young white women. McCain also, not incidentially, took a move last week to get lots of "McCain rejects affirmative action" headlines before the low-attention public. He is successfully playing on white fears of a black candidate, no doubt.

BUT -- here is the point -- McCain will ALSO succeed brilliantly if bloggers and pundits and media heads start blabbering about racism right now. That will bring race front and center to the campagin, exactly what Rove-McCain want! In addition, McCain benefits a lot from the whining responses of Axelrod and the Obama campaign. They keep saying "this is not the John McCain we know," not the "honorable John McCain." That is a very weak response and all it does is validate that, underneath, McCain supposedly IS honorable. This approach will allow McCain to take the low road this summer - smearing his opponent in August, just like they did with Kerry four years ago -- and then "rediscover" his basically honorable self for the closing phases of the campaign after Labor Day, when of course there will be a foreign policy crisis manufactured to play to his supposed strengths.

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Michael Kinsley has an incisive opinion piece at TIME/CNN called "Divided They Fall" -- and I urge everyone to read it. Kinsley points out that Republicans are setting aside their gripes about McCain and uniting to do battle, but progressives and Democrats are up to the same old internal sniping: single issue people bashing Obama for moving to the middle or voting a certain way on FISA, when his vote made no difference at all to the outcome; Clintonites using media sexism in the primary as an excuse to threaten to stay home or vote for McCain; fat cats who backed Clinton complaining to the New York Times, along with the blustering egotists like Carville; Jesse Jackson sniping about the common-sense notion that black people might have to be good parents as well as expect help from government.

This leaves one very sad. The social and redistributive stakes in this election are enormous. McCain can easily win if this summer is wasted, if Democrats do not unite and go on the offensive, if funders withold their efforts, if gripers undermine. But that seems to be what we are all doing.

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Although Obama seems to be "up" in current national polls, McCain is actually doing a much better job of shaping the agenda to his advantage. He has used strong symbols (it does not matter if they are "gimmicks") to portray himself as activist on gas prices and the environment and put apparent distance between himself and Bush. And he has managed to paint Obama as an ordinary schemer on campaign finance. Abetted by the media's proclivity for dramatic gestures and horse race analysis, the McCain camp has done what it needs to portray their man as a fighting underdog focused on real-world issues. Meanwhile, Obama's "economic tour" has gone little noticed -- and his campaign seems not to understand how very difficult it will be to get the media to convey the economic stakes in this election to ordinary voters.

Baldly put, the last two weeks leave me wondering if Obama's campaign is prepared for the general election battle. Here are my questions:

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Since the Obama campaign announced its intention to stay out of the public financing system for the 2008 general election campaign, there has been a lot of predictable harrumphing from editorial commentators who were strangely silent when the McCain campaign cheated in the existing system during the primaries (using it to guarantee a loan and then backing out so McCain can do unlimited spending until the convention). Most commentators have airly dismissed the Obama argument that using the contributions and energies of millions of modest donors is a better road to political reform than trying to manuever in a broken public system that has many holes and has left Democrats in the past vulnerable to variegated big-money maneuvers by conservatives.

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