Can we allow ourselves a moment to feel optimistic about the candidacy of Barack Obama? What with the blowout in South Carolina on Saturday, and the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy yesterday, followed by that of Ted Kennedy today, I’m starting to think we might actually win this thing.

I know: with hope comes the very real danger of disappointment. But how odd it is to find the naysayers to be people within our own party. Of course we should have expected the Clintons to fight dirty (see below) when Obama started to look like a real threat to her presumed nomination, and it must be maddening for Hillary and her camp to suddenly find themselves playing a centrist Hubert Humphrey role to Obama’s Bobby Kennedy, trying like crazy to kill whatever buzz there seems to be in the air about the possibility of a president who actually inspires people. But now we are seeing that very same don’t-dare-dream mantra coming from some on the left as well.

Today it’s Paul Krugman, the Times’s resident Marxist economist, telling Obama supporters not to kid themselves. No one can transcend partisanship, he argues; this is one of the lessons of the Clinton administration. “Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).”

In other words: your man may be clean but they’re still going to play dirty. (And we in the media aren’t goiing to do anything to level the playing field either.) Fair enough. I don’t really believe anyone in Obama’s tents really think that the dark forces of the right are going to lay down their arms should he get the nomination, let alone make it to the White House. And Krugman’s complaints with the candidate are substantive in nature, as well: Hillary’s health care plan is truly universal, for instance, and she has a record of fighting.

And fighting. Which is the point: people are sick of it. Sick enough that someone preaching transcendence of the red-blue inertia might actually appeal to the general electorate in ways that anyone with the Clinton name cannot. The Obama opponents act offended that he inspires people — how cynical is that? “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose,” she scolded the candidate in New Hampshire (uh, could we do a matchup of her and Obama’s books?), sounding very much like the ant taking the grasshopper to task for making music when he should have been hoarding grain.

But the goals of the two candidates are not that dissimilar, health care mandates aside, and from this perch it looks like Obama is the more likely candidate to win enough votes to actually try and achieve them. So why not let the grasshopper take the lead here? We’ve all heard your singing.

This weekend I had dinner with my friends Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, whose Big Dance Theaterhas just been commisioned by the French Institute Alliance Francaise to create a piece in residence at Lyon this summer. (Sounds like a typical French trap: “We will give you money to create an avant garde theater piece but you must live in France and eat our food and drink our wine while you do it!”) The commission stipulated that the piece be based on a classic French film and Paul and Annie-B decided they wanted to use one they had not seen, just to make things interesting. So they read a lot of scripts and discovered that most of the screenplays of those great French New Wave films really weren’t very good. It was the way they were made — the performances, the direction, the cinematography — that made them memorable and magic.

In other words: don’t shoot the piano player, okay?