This is stirring. As much as I tend to the cynical, I believe it is heartfelt. I would love to see a President Obama -- any president, for that matter -- put it into practice.
But this is not -- although it could have been -- the way that candidate Obama has run his campaign or the message he has run it on. I believe he sincerely would have preferred that it be different: more elevated and more honest, less beholden to party orthodoxy and less slashing toward opponents.
Yet Obama has run a rather standard Democratic campaign, largely obeisant to party constituencies and allergic to difficult choices. Run it brilliantly, yes, but not with much more than a passing hint of the new politics he envisions. Better angels, it seems, do not make the best campaign strategists.
Accepting his party's nomination in Denver, Obama decried the use of "stale tactics to scare voters." A few weeks later, he was airing ads warning that John McCain wanted to privatize Social Security and would slash seniors' benefits almost in half. You can't get much staler than that.
Certainly, John McCain did not shy away from the cheap shot or the divisive argument; the palling-around-with-terrorists, Obama-as-socialist themes were not the elevated campaign that he, too, pledged to run.
I don't blame Obama for responding in kind as much as I bristle at his simultaneous posture that he is above that sort of gutter politics. Even more, I question his assumption that the pressures that led him to such campaign tactics will somehow melt away after the election.
