One rap on Obama that keeps coming back is that he is too poetic. I suppose that is supposed to conjure images of what the country might look like if run by Gregory Corso or something but it still seems like an odd criticism. “Oh, he’s too eloquent!” After seventy-seven years of Bush aren’t we due for some eloquence?

The real message of Hillary’s line — “You speak in poetry but you govern in prose!” — is: beware the sliver-tongued devil! I think the male-female split over Obama-Clinton (made all the clearer as the results of Tuesday’s primaries are parsed) is very telling. A lot of hard-working women relate to Hillary and think of her as one of them. She’s been paying dues for years, working her fingers to the bone while her faithless husband (a sliver-tongued devil if there ever was one) fluttered about making a mess of things, and making time with the help while he was at it.

Women in business have seen this pattern: they spent nights and weekends cranking out spread sheets and doing due diligence and into the Monday morning meeting comes some Johnny (and he’s always a Johnny) come lately. He’s slick, he’s handsome, he can charm the pants off a meter maid and he may not be up to the minute on the latest data, he sees the Big Picture. He’s an inspiration guy, here to give the team a big lift, and Suzy, maybe you can help him with some of your research?

Burns their biscuits, and rightfully so. But I don’t think Obama is that guy. First, he’s been a hard working legislator, eight years in the state legislature in Illinois and then two in the US Senate, and before that a community organizer is Chicago, in parts of the community no one wanted to touch, let alone organize. Secondly, now’s the time. As he says invoking the inexperienced JFK, history won’t wait. I honestly believe that HRC can’t beat McCain — too much baggage, too many negatives, not the least of which comes with old silver-tongue himself. The GOP will hit Obama with the inexperience charge but I believe that the national nausea over the old fights is not to be underestimated. Fresh and optimistic might just trump raging, war-mongering paranoia.

And thirdly, poetry has a time-honored place in politics. When the two converge, movements are born. People are stirred by words to action, sometimes even sacrifice — a concept that Obama (unlike our president) is not afraid to invoke. What was Kennedy’s inaugural address if not poetry? You may not think much of his legacy or accomplishments in his too-brief time in office, but the poetry got a lot of people to think about what they could do for their country, instead of vice versa, some for the very first time. What was the “I Have A Dream” speech? The Sermon on the Mount?

Not that I pretend to know who Jesus would have voted for. Chances are he would have said, “Vote Ceasar, and move on.” But let’s stop dissing the healing, and moving, power of poetry in politics. As a good friend of Corso’s said, singing his own paean to America, “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

Having just watched Obama’s non-victory speech in Chicago I found the heart I had been losing just an hour or so before. Watching Hillary claim the states that Democrats traditionally win (NY, New Jersey & Mass) that for a moment or two we thought we might steal away, I thought that maybe the dream was over. The machine that HC had oiled well in advance was paying off for her and Obama was supposed to be crushed by it.

But my man sure didn’t sound crushed. Could it have been those significant wins in Connecticut and Minnesota, with Missouri hanging in the balance, at 12:14 am EST? Those are states the Dems need in a general election and not ones we can take for granted. Maybe he was feeling something that machines can’t feel.

A number of people emailed me the link to will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video yesterday, a musical mash-up of performers like him and John Legend singing and rapping along to Obama’s last non-victory speech, in New Hampshire. It was a heartfelt and handmade tribute that it would be easy to mock if it weren’t for the fact that no campaign paid for it. It was a true labor of love, of hope and optimism.

They’re going to be counting votes in California for many more hours to come and I may wake up to a more decisive Clinton victory there than exit polls are predicting. CNN just declared her the victor with the majority of the delegates — again, a state where she had a twenty point advantage just a few weeks ago. But the fight goes on, between the machine woman (why else did Hillary sound darn wonky and on autopilot in what should have been her impassioned victory speech in NYC tonight?) and the man of heart.

As Carl Bernstein quoted Vernon Jordan (old Clinton friend and benefactor) as saying, “It’s hard to run against a movement.” And as much as the Clintons may wish Obama and all of us behind him would just go away, we won’t. It still comes down to delegates and let’s talk tomorrow when we they have divvied them all up. No one’s going to have enough marbles to go home. We’re still in this and I do mean we. Hillary, who I really don’t mean to demonize, seems to think she is here to save us if we would just give her the chance. Obama seems to suggest we could save ourselves from four or eight more years of endless bickering bullshit, if we believe we can. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said tonight. And now we are here.

Watching the last debate between Hillary and Obama, in which no punches were landed and niceness, even if slightly insincere, was the word of the day, I thought of my man in a new guise: The brother from another planet.

Whether or not you buy the whole transcendance-of-partisanship thing, you have to admit that his Kenyan-Kansan legacy puts an interesting twist on the black-white rift that has defined so much of modern American politics. And in his Motown suit and pre-fro sixties short haircut, he even looks like a throwback to the style of late fifties. Think of Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still, whose character landed on earth preaching peace & harmony — before it was too late! (I know, I’ve invoked that movie here before; I guess I saw it an influential age. I can still remember the lobbying effort my brother Brian made in order to convince us to watch that on TV instead of our standby for that time slot, Rocky and Bullwinkle)

Just as I was slipping into a moonage daydream of Democratic peace making, I read that NASA had sent the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” across the universe. The space agency sent the Lennon composition, via its Deep Space Network antenna, toward the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away, before anyone (or thing) out there had a chance to request it. This was done with the blessings of Ringo and Paul, though perhaps the latter wondered why NASA had not considered one of his songs.

Actually, I always thought “Across the Universe” a kind of depressing song; that was part of its charm. Coming in the wake of the Beatles’ visit to India, the chorus couples the Hindu chant “Jai guru deva om” with John’s own odd non-affirmation: “Nothing’s going to change my world.”

Bummer! Is that the message we want to send to the universe? Sounds more like the message that the status quo of our party, and our country for that matter, want to send to the electorate. “You cannot change the rules of the game,” is what Clintonistas like Sidney Blumenthal mean when they speak of fulfilling partisanship rather than transcending it. In order for them to win, the other side must lose. It’s how they keep score.

The last time NASA sent a rock song into the stratosphere was when they included “Johnny B. Goode” on the Voyager playlist, amidst recordings of Bach, Beethoven and pan pipes from the Solomon Islands. That was launched over twenty years ago and they finally got word back from space:

“Send more Chuck Berry!”

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?

I was down by flu this week and uncompelled to blog though I thought it noteworthy that the two indy films I voiced only qualified enthusiasm for (below) were both nominated for Oscars. Draw your own conclusions; do not cheat by looking at the conclusions being drawn by the person sitting next to you.

The political needle moved little in that time. (I speak here of the Democratic primaries; the GOP has its own hell to raise.) The last debate was an embarrassing mudfest, good only for allowing Edwards to emerge with some dignity which is how he will be remembered as he exits the stage in the next few weeks. My man Obama looked a bit flustered caught between him and Hillary and I got a glimpse of how he might be manhandled if he were to become our party’s candidate. He looked young, and lord knows how our political system likes to exterminate youth.

But the desperation of the Clinton camp has become quite galling, and only serves to motivate those of us who would like to see some young blood in charge for a change. Forget about Bill’s maddog approach — I think part of him always wished he was a thug, a backroom brawler, and now in the guise of defending his wife’s honor, he is getting to act out another fantasy: that of the caring husband. I speak of the mudslinging being done on Hil’s behalf by other members of her posse.

In Bob Herbert’s column in the Times today, he quotes Andrew Young saying, “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.” We are not talking about Bill’s premarital dating history, of course. This would be tasteless enough if the ex-president himself hadn’t used Young as a reference to establish his black-like-me (or me-like-black) bonafides. (By this logic, Robert De Niro should win the nomination.)

Then Herbert (who is, by the way, black) found this gem from former US Senator (and current New School president) Bob Kerrey: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

This from a man who admits to murdering unarmed civilians during the Vietnam war; should that experience be considered a big deal?

None of this rear-guard action kept the Times from endorsing Hillary yesterday, even if their endorsement was somewhat tepid. Like Captain Hook, they would like to pull the plug on this whole youth & optimism thing before it gets out of hand. They are probably hoping that she will be elected (the paper’s endorsement of McCain was even more half-hearted) so they can recycle some of those old headlines: Clinton Blocks Investigation, Clinton Targets Enemies, who knows? maybe even Clinton Courts Impeachment. Nothing like a familiar refrain.