Hillary Clinton could take acting lessons from Julie Christie. For anyone who saw last night’s Academy Awards got a glimpse of the latter leading lady’s internal struggle with her emotions when the Oscar went to Marion Cotillard for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. (You know how Americans love Piaf. Rice Piaf.)

Cameras were trained on all the nominees — a dirty trick the Academy does, but a way of making sure that nominated performers never forget that it was their acting skills that bought them their seat — and when the long-shot Cotillard was announced you could see Christie’s face go through something like Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grieving — you know, denial, anger, depression, ending in acceptance. There was a nanosecond (check your Tivo) where you could see the horror: “Great, give it away to some French bitch no one has ever heard of, that’s fine, I’ll just come back the next time you have a perfect role for an aging screen diva.” And then that full-throated, wide-smiling moment where the English icon acknowledged the work and the craft and the magic that brings us all together.

How much you want to bet that she went home and kicked her cat?

Hillary has her own arriviste to contend with, of course, and resorted to some histrionics herself over the weekend to try and wrestle back the limelight from Obama. (I don’t know how you wrestle light, but I think there is a CGI award for that.) First she accused him of misrepresenting her position on NAFTA in some flyers being distributed in Ohio, saying “Shame on you, Barack Obama!”. Then she made fun of the Hope-monger for the messianic nature of his rallies, riffing on “celestial choirs” and Obama’s “magic wand”. (If despair and cynicism were a winning platform, Dick Cheney would be running.)

Maybe she is in the final throes herself, moving through the anger and denial to accept the very real possibility that she will be called upon to play a supporting role in the big blockbuster coming this fall. As Jon Stewart noted last night, “Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.” All hands on deck!

Besides, as the New York Times reminded us this morning, the expression “a heartbeat away from the presidency” might never be truer than it would be under Obama. Assassination rumors were circulating before the primary in South Carolina (a long-time political reporter in DC said when he heard about the backwash, “I wonder if the Clintons started that chatter?”) and it was one of the first questions Michelle Obama raised with her husband before he ran. Just last week a friend forwarded me a story about the Secret Service relaxing security at an Obama rally in Dallas. According to the Dallas police chief, the very people charged with guarding Obama told cops to stop searching bags and having people walk through metal detectors, I guess due to their great track record of protecting people in Dallas. Sounds like one of those paranoid political thrillers that Americans like about as much as Piaf.

Couples counselors see this scenario all the time: A couple comes to them say 18, 19 times. First few months there is a lot of old garbage hauled out. That old girlfriend that keeps calling. The line of credit she opened without telling him. And would it kill you to pick your gym clothes up off the bathroom floor?

But at some point the old barbs don’t work anymore. One party decides that he or she is done and the tried and true insults just don’t get the same reaction that they used to.

So it seemed to me watching last night’s Democratic debate. It was for the most part an amicable affair; if as reported Clinton’s camp had been warring over how hard to come at Obama, the nicer side seemed to have won — most of the time. And when the non-issue of Obama plagiarizing words from a supporter’s speech came up, and Hillary tried to hit him with a late, lame shot (calling it “change you can Xerox”), the crowd groaned and her opponent shook his head. He didn’t care anymore. He was so over her.

And small wonder, given estimates that HRC must win very decisively (ie, by more than 10%) in TX and OH to stay in the hunt. The nomination is now his to lose. And though her closing remarks were truly altruistic and brought the crowd to its feet, some such as Chris Matthews saw them as valedictory, like the scene where the hero does something really noble because he knows he’s not coming back. (For those who missed it, most of the questions posed to the candidates had been substantive ones regarding health care, immigration, the state of the economy and other hot-button issues. But the last, from CNN moderator Campbell Brown was a big meatball of a slow pitch: “I’m wondering if both of you will describe what was the moment that tested you the most, that moment of crisis.” (She did not get to ask them if they were a color, what color they would be.)

Obama actually fumbled this one, offering a precis of his life (single mom, absent dad, bad choices, call to service) that sounded more like a Hollywood pitch than a defining-moment moment. Hillary romped, first going for self-pity and sympathy — “Well, I think everybody here knows I’ve lived through some crises and some challenging moments in my life” (huge applause) — before putting some serious spin on it by recalling watching limbless Iraqi war veterans limping their way into a hospital in San Antonio. “You know,” she concluded, ” the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.”

She knocked it out of the park, proving if nothing else that the old girl still has some serious game. Obama did not look too concerned, though. In his mind I think he may already be out the door, looking at apartments. Perhaps he’ll ask her to join him as partners — strictly business, of course — when this messiness is over. She did, after all, take his hand in front of everybody and say, “Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine.”

Isn’t it great when therapy works? Makes up for those other clients who are in so much denial.

There’s an interesting piece by Kate Zernike in today’s Times on The Charisma Mandate. Presidential historians including Robert Cato and Doris Kearns Goodwin opine on the record of such orators as FDR and LBJ — who, when he wasn’t in front of the country on TV defending a war he hardly believed in could speechify with conviction. Or at least enough conviction to get the job (ie, the Civil Rights Act) done and move others to follow his lead, which is sort of the point.

The subtext, or pretext, for the article is Obama, naturally, and the criticisms coming from both Clinton and McCain that he is all talk and no experience. Or as HRC said campaigning in Texas last week, “all hat and no cattle”, which makes for a funny image: Obama in a ten-gallon hat, like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles, who rode into town to the sounds of Count Basie’s big band. Most of the town wanted to lynch him, you may recall.

But the cattle Clinton is talking about is experience, and maybe a wonky grasp of policy. (To counter these criticisms, Obama has been slowing his stump speech down and studding it with the political equivalent of filler, saving the all-killer routine for his victory speeches.) And while the historians quoted in Zernike’s piece warn against hubris and “the cult of personality,” most allow that you need to inspire to lead. “Politics is about policy, but it’s also about giving people some kind of sense of participating in a common venture with their fellow citizens,” says Alan Wolfe of Boston College. There’s a reason they call it a mass movement: the masses have to be moved toward the mountain. And when not being paranoid, even Clinton’s supporters admit that Obama’s mountain does not look a lot different than hers. So the question is still: who can get us there?

Goodwin, who has written biographies of presidents as diverse as Lincoln and LBJ, thinks this dilemma could be settled “if you could mush Clinton and Obama together as one person” But isn’t that what a joint ticket is for? Why not Obama-Clinton? If the debate really comes down to details versus charisma, I would argue that it is easier to add details than charisma. My wife, who has had the privilege of meeting the former First Lady, swears she is dynamic in person. It just doesn’t translate so well behind the podium, or even working the town hall meeting. Bill, when he isn’t hating Obama’s guts, has to be marveling at the kid’s moves. He is the best natural politician of our time and denying it just makes you look tone-deaf.

One of my political epiphanies came many years ago. I had volunteered to help the gubernatorial race of Tom Bradley, mayor of Los Angeles, in 1982, not because I was high on Bradley (don’t know anyone who was) but because I felt guilty for not sucking it up and voting for Carter in the presidential election of 1980. (I think I voted for John Anderson, who created his own Nader effect in that race.) Reagan was now in power and giving us a very vivid picture of just how bad a GOP presidency could be. (It would take GWB to come along years later to make the Reagan years look positively utopian in contrast.) Since I was driving a taxi for a living then, and since I was friends with some pretty girl who was working as a campaign flack for Bradley, I ended up playing chauffeur to him and his campaign manager for a day in Northern California.

It was an eye-opening afternoon. We drove from house party to house party (the last and most notable of the day was held at Francis Coppola’s estate in the Napa Valley) and I watched as the well-heeled slipped checks into the mayor’s pocket and they froze for a grip-and-grin photo. He spent the time between events poring over spread sheets and making notes (this was in the day before cell phones, remember, or else he might have been raising money as he rode as well). It wasn’t until the end of the day, when we stopped at a labor rally in the East Bay and I heard an old-fashioned, red-meat, Republican-bashing party boss get up and rouse the rabble that I realized what Bradley was missing: Charisma. The man did not have a drop of it and when he rose to speak in the larger venues, people in the back of the hall turned to talk to each other.

He lost, of course. Polls put him on the fast track to being our nation’s first black governor and the fact that some voters apparently changed their minds once they got in the voting booth has come to be referred to as The Bradley Effect, which states that white people say they’ll vote for a black politician until left to their own prejudices. The Bradley Effect was evoked when Obama lost in New Hampshire but has been called into question as he has made inroads with more white voters in the following state primaries.

That whole topic is too much for one post, obviously. My takeaway from the day I spent with Tom Bradley was that nothing replaces charisma. He lost to the equally uncharismatic GOP candidate George Deukmejian at a time when Californians were just crazy for anyone who promised not to raise their taxes. (Californians, with their failing infrastructure, collapsing schools and closed libraries are still reaping the whirlwind of their civic greed.) It seemed up close that Bradley didn’t have the fire in the belly, or any other part of him. It seemed like he was running because he had been told to, or just thought that he deserved the job. And that’s no way to run a campaign.

Among the encouraging data emerging from yesterday’s Obamarama was the news that more women and older men voted for the senator from Illinois. Clinton’s camp had been claiming a lock on working women, men over 65 and blue collars of all ages but Obama made inroads with all three in Virginia, splitting those demos with Hillary across the state. Those who had hoped this was a doomed children’s crusade are left looking for new arrows to sling.

Speaking to a energized crowd in Madison, Wisconsin Obama went for inevitability. “At this point the cynics can no longer say our hope is false,” he said but at almost the same instant, John McCain was trying to harsh the mellow. “Hope is a powerful thing,” he said in his own victory speech. But: “To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.”

Take that! Interesting that Mac has already decided who he is running against in the fall (note to Hillary) and even more significant that his antidote to the powerful “Yes We Can” message of Obama’s McCain is the rather expected refrain of “No You Can’t.” He would swat Peter Pan down with a swipe of his hook if only he could raise his arms above his shoulders. By reminding everyone every chance he’s got that he was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam war, McCain is counting on that good soldier juju that worked so well for Bob Dole and John Kerry.

But Obama has been anticipating that line of attack by honoring McCain’s “half century of service” (wow, how old is that guy?) while criticizing his politics. “We honour his service, but his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people because they are bound to the failed policies of the past,” he said, not for the first time. The contrast between the vibrant Democratic candidate and the rather jowly, angry looking Republican was all the more striking because CNN cut away from Obama to McCain, standing in front of a waxworks worth of followers. That was when my daughter, who is from South America, looked up from her homework to say, “Wow, who are all those old white people?”

I’m glad if we’ve got some of them, too, even if you want to include me in that equation. As a member of the boomer generation, though, I am looking forward to debates that don’t focus on Vietnam or for that matter Woodstock. I was 14 then and, like McCain, couldn’t make the scene (I was busy dancing around my bedroom in my underpants, pretending I was Pete Townshend — he was there!) Enough already. Woodstock to me is Snoopy’s friend, and they must be celebrating themselves. With Uno declared best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, Tuesday was a great day for beagles as well. Let’s all dance.

British magazines like Uncut and Mojo exist to prey on middle-aged men like me. There I was in the temple of the Virgin on Thursday (record stores, as we once called them, are a refuge for boomers too), buying an odd assortment of CDs (Marley’s Exodus; the soundtrack to I’m Not There, Tom Waits’ odds & sods assortment Orphans and Radiohead’s In Rainbows — just ten bucks! which was about the kids had already decided it was worth when the band did a forward-looking pay-what-you-want sale of the album online) when I saw the latest Uncut at the checkout line.

The March cover features Rod Stewart and the Faces, circa 1971, with a teaser that promised yet another rehash of a story many rock fans have heard before (“Bottoms Up! The untold story of rock’s ultimate hellraisers”). Of course I had to buy it. These magazines are like porn for guys like me and I have to smuggle them past my wife. (“Didn’t you bring home a big Jimi Hendrix special last month?”) I think of the Time-Life books ads I use to see on TV when I was kid, for titles steeped in nostalgia for people of my parents’ generation, filled with images of soldiers and their girlfriends dancing to Benny Goodman, and wonder if I have fallen into the same trap.

Of course Uncut and Mojo are not entirely mired in the past. This issue includes reviews of contemporary artists (Supergrass, Drive By Truckers) and a whole CD of mostly new “rock ‘n’ roll in the spirit of the Faces”. But I have to cop to wanting to buy a piece of the past, a moment lost in time.

I was a junior in high school in 1971, and most of the bands we went to hear in Sacramento and sometimes San Francisco were at the tired end of the psychedelic scene. I remember seeing Quicksilver Messenger Service in a rather late and unfortunate phase. Lead singer Dino Valenti (who had been MIA on a drug rap for a few years) paced the stage, babbling incoherently before singing hippie shit like “Have another hit of fresh air.” It felt like the end of an era, lacking in both verve and showmanship. It was the beginning of shoe-gazing, from performers too stoned to do anything else.

The Faces we knew from when they were Small. Their psychedelic hit of a few years earlier, “Itchycoo Park,” would inspire countless kids to skip school (“Why go to learn the words of fools?”) and I was no exception. But the new Faces were a slightly less droogie bunch. With Ron Wood and Rod Stewart, who had both recently fled Jeff Beck’s band, added to the mix (Stewart to replace former frontman Steve Marriott) they were singing more rough-and-tumble, tongue-in-cheek numbers about girls and drinking.

I don’t remember who opened for them at the Cal Expo but it was a kind of heavy metal I had not been subjected to, at least in concert, and what was worst about it was that I couldn’t split; it was way too crowded. The crunching chords and death-tinged songs weren’t mixing with the drugs I had taken for the concert and by the time they finished I was exhausted from fighting off visions of purple windmills and bats from hell.

From the Faces’ opener (“Bad ‘n’ Ruin,” I think; that tour was captured on the live album Long Player) it was clear that this group had another agenda. They were laughing and strutting and drinking (I learned in the Uncut article that they innovated the idea of putting a bar, complete with bartender, on stage for their live act) and the whole thing seemed like a lark. When Stewart dueted on Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” with bassist Ronnie Lane, the latter had to stand on a soap box. (That’s why they had been known as the Small Faces.) It was funny, in a arms-around-the-shoulder-of-your-mate kind of way, and made everyone in the crowd feel like they were up on that stage with them.

By picking up Uncut the other day I was probably trying to capture a little of that feeling, that out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new kind of vibe I had that night. (I’ll resist any Obama comparisons here — though Hillary is the one who wanted to commemorate the Woodstock festival.) Lane is dead and Wood became a Stone and poor Rod Stewart seems to be turning into Perry Como, right before our eyes. But a few well-chosen pictures and memories got me rolling home, back to “Gasoline Alley” where I started from…