I speak here not of Obama but of my favorite first novel of the year to date: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. Sharp Teeth (the title is the only thing about the book I’m not 100% sure of, if for no other reason than I have trouble remembering it) is the story of werewolves in Los Angeles — great, you say, another one of those. But before you clutter your head with images of Michael Landon or Warren Zevon I should point out that this book features werewolves competing in bridge tournaments, and at least one who grapples with the lure of Kibbles & Bits. Call it the Call of the Domesticated.

And did I mention that it is written in blank verse? You know, like the Aenied. I’ve been avoiding the reviews, as I usually do when I’m enjoying something, but I gather some critics were put off by Barlow’s use of this rather antiquated form. Me, I think it gives the whole proceedings a kind of heroic (and occasionally mock-heroic) quality that the story told straight wouldn’t have. Some reviewers also seem to resent the fact that Barlow is the creative director of an advertising agency in Detroit (as opposed to a Trustafarian graduate of some prestigious writing program living in Brooklyn) and suspect everything right down to the packaging. (The hardcover is dust-jacket free, with blurbs from favorable British reviews printed inside.)

But how did the book come to be reviewed in the UK first? Because it was published there first, and I would love to see the rejection letters Barlow collected from US publishers while trying to get someone to have a good look at it here. (Harper Collins no doubt found it easier to print the book once it had enjoyed success overseas.) It’s hard out there for a pimp, let alone a lycanthrope: As my friend Charlie Haas said to me recently, the publishing business is run by reading groups. If your book isn’t the kind that will stand up to those sorts of questions that are posed in the backs of books meant to get a coffee klatsch started, then your effort is probably dead meat. The kind even werewolves won’t touch.

And book groups are mostly made up of women (news flash), and most women reading “werewolves in modern LA” are going to turn the page or put the book back on the table at Barnes & Noble in favor of some Elizabeth Gilbert knock-off. (Barlow’s book might better have been titled Eat, Prey, Run.) More’s the pity. Sharp Teeth features at least one great female character (yeah, she turns into a wolf too) but more importantly deals, on a pretty visceral level, with a lot of those man-woman questions of the shall-I-trust-him-or-kill-him-first variety familiar to anyone who has ever been in love.

But monster, even monster as metaphor is something I think most publishers don’t believe women would gravitate towards. (Which is why they’ve stayed away in droves from Beauty and the Beast.) I’m glad Harper Collins had the cojones to publish this funny, gripping and original book. Is it coincidence that the same house will be publishing Charlie’s first novel, that went through its own share or rejections and rewrites? Only a fool would write a novel in this day and age, I’ve heard it said, and, as I embark on revising my own, I confess to be one of those fools. At least I can sleep through a full moon.

I wanted to watch the season finale of The Wire last night but was stymied by HBO On Demand. Generally HBOOD subscribers have been able to watch episodes a week before they air but now that the series is coming to a close, and my favorite characters are getting killed off (goodbye, Omar! so long, Snoop!), I’ve been told that I have to wait until March 10 — a day after the finale airs.

Well, what’s the point of that? I want to fast forward to the conclusion — just like I would prefer to speed through the coming six weeks and get to the Pennsylvania primary to see what’s going to happen. Of course I was disappointed in the results of this week (though they’re still digging through the TX caucus results as I write) and hate to think that this thing is going to be settled by the kind of fear-mongering displayed in Hillary’s three am phone call ad, which seems to have played pretty well in Ohio. But mostly I would just like to get to the part where we’re fighting with Republicans again.

I mean, I like political process more than most but at the end of the day, it’s hard to really dislike Hillary. She’s just kind of a boring scold with a dangerous sense of self-entitlement — not a possibly deranged, Frankenstein monster of a conservative like the GOP’s presumptive nominee. That fight will be a lot more fun. We can all sing “Fie on Goodness,” along with the restless knights of Camelot. (“Ah, to spend a tortured evening staring at the floor/Guilty and alive once more!”)

But now the rest of these states want to vote and if Hillary does as well as polls (and her people) indicate she will in PA, she will continue to crow about her electability and Obama’s amateur status. And he has made a few missteps this week, blaming the press for being mean to him and then giving a mish-mash of a speech Tuesday night that sounded more like a joint effort by Mister Potato Head and Woody Guthrie than the kind of ringing poetry we’ve come to expect from the man.

But if setbacks like the Ohio and Texas defeats really knock him off his game, he probably doesn’t deserve to be president. Hillary is right to say that she has been vetted more than Obama has, mostly because she’s been out there longer, drawing fire from the GOP death squads. I think Obama needs to learn to take her kitchen-sink attacks — deal with the Rezko connection, answer the NAFTA memo questions — and lob back a few of his own. Might I suggest he look at a little documentary called The War Room? That’s where we saw Bill Clinton’s then-cornermen, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville perfect the art of the modern political counter-punch.

As far as The Wire goes, I’m not expecting any miracles. Generally each season has ended the same way, with the same old crooks in power, doing the same old same old. But there is also, always, a glimmer of hope. You just have to wait for it.

There’s a large sign in the window of the Gray’s Papaya at the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue: YES SENATOR OBAMA, it says in block letters and then, for reasons only Gray’s copy editor could address it continues, in quotes: “We Are Ready to Believe Again.”

The primaries in NY are long gone, of course, and I don’t think the hot dog vendor was trying to reach folks in Rhode Island or Vermont. (For those of you outside of the area, Gray’s Papaya is one of those peculiarly NY establishments that boasts $1.25 hot dogs and papaya juice to help you digest what otherwise might be indigestible — a sort of metaphor for the city entire, where energy and culture ameliorate all the ugliness and stress.) The sign is more a show of faith, and it voices the kind of sentiment Hillary’s people love to hate.

“What does believing have to do with anything?” they wail. “Believe in what? Define your terms, damn it!” It is just such sentiments, reminiscent of Peter Pan’s exhortation to clap your hands if you believe in fairies, that makes them want to give all of us Obama people a three a.m. wake-up call.

Unfortunately, the person who does not clap when Tinkerbell is dead looks like a grouch. As Jon Stewart observed when he interviewed HRC last night, it must be hard to run against hope.

It must be hard to run on fear, too. I have a sense that the three a.m. phone call ad (which asked voters who they wanted answering the White House phone at three in the morning while your innocent babies sleep) has not played so well in the heartland, where she meant to strike fear. (Since you are probably reading this after the Super Tuesday Two primaries, you may have a better idea of how effective it was.) And the sad fact is that at a Hillary White House the only person up at that hour would be Bill, home from a night of tomcattin’.

Now the Obama bashing, or at least vetting, has begun in earnest as reporters dog-pile on issues such as the Canadian NAFTA memo in which one of Obama’s advisors is reported to have reassured some Canadian government officials that the Senator from Illinois doesn’t mean what he says about protectionism and free trade; he’s just trying to get votes. It’s hard to tell at this juncture if that story has legs, though most good political scandals have some character with a Dickensian, Drudge like name in the center, and this one has a fellow named Austan Goolsbee.

Sunday New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson suggested “that after Tuesday if there’s a clear indication of a solid lead in delegate count, by voters not superdelegates … we as a party … have got to see whether it makes sense to continue a very divisive primary between now and Pennsylvania and then the convention.” There is a growing sense among machers in the party (and Richardson is surely one, which is why he can get away with the beard) that more street fighting between our candidates will only embolden the GOP (as well as give them fresh ammo) for the general election. But the idea that Hillary would just walk away at this point seems far-fetched. You might even call it a fairy tale.

I was running in place on the elliptical trainer (the kind of activity that would seem to imply that the evolution of the species had reached a dead end, or was, perhaps, moving backwards), listening to the Rail and Road Report on NY1 when I heard: “And if you’re taking the Taconic, there are reports of some black guys out there so you want to be careful.”

Sure, I thought: black guys on the state parkway. That would be scary. Set phasers on stun. Until I realized that the reporter had said black ICE, a special and treacherous feature of East Coast winter driving.

It was one of those subliminally racist moments, the kind they sang about in Avenue Q. Race has been in the air a lot of late, thanks in part to the candidacy of Barack Obama; the Clintons have opted for a subtle approach in reminding people that the man isn’t white (Bill mentioning Jesse Jackson in South Carolina, Hillary digging in on Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement in the last debate) while the Swift Boat types on the right are already roiling the internet waters with rumors that he’s a closet Muslim (his middle name is Hussein, you know). And did we mention that he was black?

One of the reasons Obama’s victory in Iowa was such a stunner is that the state is so damned white, many pundits thought voters would follow suit. And after Hillary’s victory in New Hampshire those same dispensers of conventional wisdom said see? We told you. But since then, as he has romped to victory in 11 primaries and counting, winning support among whites of all ages, and both sexes, a lot of us have held our collective breath. Could it be that a sizable number of Americans really just don’t care anymore?

I have no particular expertise here. I grew up in a couple of small towns in Northern California that were probably 95% white. The few black families there lived in their own communities, outside of town (and you can imagine what the less enlightened townsfolk called those communities) and I didn’t really encounter a lot of blacks until I moved to San Francisco, and then Oakland, and now Brooklyn — where the neighborhood I live in is still majority black (though growing whiter by the day). I am still subject to unconscious race reaction, making a note to myself when everyone on the bus, save me, is black.

But my kids, who grew up in the same cities mentioned above, are coming from a different place entirely. When my son told me about his friends at his Brooklyn middle school, he never mentioned what color they were ( don’t think it registered), and I was always surprised to meet these black, brown and Asian kids. Our daughter, who was born in Paraguay, identifies herself as non-white and left a mosh-pit slam-dancing party last month “because everybody was so white.” She likes to give me a hard time for having only dated white girls.

Sharon Begley wrote an enlightening piece in Newsweek entitled How Your Brain Looks at Race. Evolutionary scientists let us off the hook by saying: some racial reaction is hardwired. Early man didn’t wander far and when he encountered people who looked different than him, they generally wanted to kill him. But time, and experience, can override that wiring.

“Many whites who profess to be race-blind unconsciously associate dark skin with negative traits and ideas (evil, failure, dangerous), and light skin with positive ones (joy, love, peace), shows an assessment called the Implicit Association Test,” writes Begley. “When white Americans see photos flashed so quickly that they can be detected only subliminally, the amygdala, which signals ‘Watch out!,’ is significantly more active in response to black than white faces. If the photos appeared long enough to be processed consciously, however, the amygdala quieted down and the rational, thoughtful prefrontal cortex perked up. You could practically hear the cortex telling the amygdala to pipe down and stop being a racist jerk.”

Over the next eight months I suspect we will experience something like this, collectively, as the nation tries to wrap its mind around the reality of a black party nominee (not to mention a black president). It may get treacherous at times, and downright slippery, but I think, in the evolutionary sense, we are moving in the right direction.

I suddenly recalled being in high school and trying to leave some literature about Shirley Chisholm (a black congresswoman who ran for president in 1972) at a barbershop in Auburn, California. The barber responded by taking a rifle down from the wall. Chisholm is dead now — but I bet you anything that barber is, too. In fact, it’s probably not even a barbershop anymore. For all I know they sell candles there now, the kind you’re supposed to light instead of cursing the darkness.

MSNBC’s broadcast of last night’s Democratic presidential candidate’s debate was the second most-watched programin its time slot. With 7.9 million viewers it was bested only by American Idol , making it the most watched televised debate of this season and the most watched program in the cable net’s history.

That last ain’t saying much, of course. Back when I was writing about the media for Salon, I would often hear from Brian Williams, who was then hosting the network’s ten pm news hour, just because I mentioned him in my column. A hundred thousand viewers was a big night for him; it was the Lonely Guy’s network, a comforter for political wonks who liked to curl up in front of its news shows with a box of chow fun and a cold can of ginger ale.

Cable news has been enjoying a huge spike in ratings this year, thanks in part to the surprising rise of Obama and the protracted fall of Hillary Clinton. I was flying to California last Thursday, during the Texas debate on CNN, and at least half of the seat-back TVs were tuned to that debate as well. (The others were watching college hoops.) Arguably, any flight from NY to SF is probably not a representative cross-section of the electorate, and it was Jet Blue, not Jet Red — but still, voters (and viewers) are undeniably fired up, as the man says. No wonder the GOP is worried.

Last night’s was the 20th Democratic debate of this political season and though I had resolved not to watch one more, I couldn’t help myself. I had told one of my students earlier that the only way HRC could change the course of events would be to pull out a gun and shoot her opponent on stage, and while things never quite reached that level, it was far from the hand-holding successful therapy session the Texas debate had been. In the evening’s most bizarre moment, Clinton even quoted a Saturday Night Live skit which made fun of the press for kowtowing to Obama (“Save me, Tina Fey, save me!”). But this time nobody laughed.

As much as I love a good fight, I found this last stand rather grim. It reminded me of the second act of Groundhog Day. Bill Murray long ago realized that he will live this day over and over but now that he has hustled every available woman in town and even tried killing himself, it is no longer fun. Hearing Clinton accuse Obama of abandoning 15 million Americans with his health care plan is just this side of waking up to Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe” for all eternity.

Their revels now are ended. Though Clinton didn’t pull a piece she did (as promised) hit the senator from Illinois with everything but the kitchen sink. Her accusation that he failed to chair hearings into the military’s handling of the war in Afghanistan may have some traction (the Clinton-friendly Salon thought it was worth a story), even though Obama admitted it and even said he was too busy running for president. (Oh, that old honesty trick!) Then she tried to snaggle him with the Farrakhan endorsement, which again only resulted in Obama saying he rejected and denounced the Nation of Islam’s leader. Now what?

The elephant boy picture that someone in her camp sent to Matt Drudge seems to have backfired, unless it was merely intended to remind people that he is black. That job will soon fall to Republicans (some of whom don’t even know how to pronounced “Kumbiya”) though they’ll need more than a turban to make people care.