We were vacationing at an eco-tourist resort on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica a few years ago (where the picture of me sitting barefoot to your left there was taken), learning about the rain forest and the peninsula’s micro climate when we weren’t drinking fruit juice and relaxing. The resort had a naturalist on staff who would take you out and introduce you to the many worlds beneath the surface of everything — the colonies of cutter ants, the fruit bats that swarmed the skies at dusk. it was a little hair-raising at times to learn just how much life was teeming all around you.

Because of its proximity to Southern California (the Osa is a straight shot, via plane, from LAX) and the excellent surfing to be found on its beaches, the place got a lot of Hollywood traffic. The guide told us about one tour he gave to a famous movie producer, a one-man show in keeping with the producer’s schedule and need for exclusivity. This mogul was famously ADD and grew flustered as the guide explained in great detail what was going on in the ecosystems at his feet and above his head. “Too much information!” he shrieked at our hapless docent, putting his hands over his ears like that fellow in The Scream. “Can’t you just make it simple?”

This was clearly a man who had heard too many high-concept pitches but our guide was obliging and started giving the producer the bare bones that’s-a-bird-and-that’s-a-bee version of his tour, but before long he found himself on the receiving end. His guest began bragging about his sexual conquests — from the models in surfing magazines to A-list movie stars — none of which the guide gave a damn about. “I wanted to cover my ears and yell back at him: ‘Too much information!'”

Having heard yet one more report about newly inaugurated New York governor David Paterson’s life as a legally blind buccaneer, I’m starting to appreciate how he felt. In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, Paterson thought it best to talk frankly about his own sexual past before he was sworn in, and in a bizarre news conference, the former lieutenant governor and his wife answered questions about their past infidelities. Then it turned out that there may have been more than one extramarital adventure (bringing to mind one of David Letterman’s Top Ten Eliot Spitzer Excuses: “Have you ever been to Albany?”).

Now he would like us to know that he also used pot and coke — okay, I got the message! If you want to get the party started, call the governor. I’d just like to say that if getting high and messing around was all it took to get appointed to political office, I should have been king of the world a long time ago. But for the time being, can’t we just give it a rest? Unless you were using the public’s money to cover up your shenanigans like the mayor of Detroit, I don’t really care what (or who) you were doing. Last I heard, New York State has a $5 billion budget deficit. Why don’t you work on filling that hole, and leave the partying to the folks in New Jersey?

I had lunch with my old friend David Talbot last week. He was my boss at Salon and my editor at a number of places before then. Last year David published an illuminating book about JFK & RFK, Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which championed Bobby as one of the first of his brother’s assassination conspiracy theorists. Before he himself was assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

We talked of Obama. I had just seen his speech on race and David, who has the same hopes for the candidate that I do (a president we can finally believe in again) said, “He needs a Bobby.” The younger Kennedy was the guy who could do the street fighting while his older sibling played statesman and kept his campaingn, for the most part, on a higher plane. When the Clintons, or whomever, sling mud and Obama retaliates, the press and his detractors react by saying, “Ah, he’s just like them! Politics as usual after all.”

I thought of David’s words this afternoon as I watched the latest bit of Clinton mud fly. It was Bill, Hillary’s own personal Bobby, getting his hands dirty again as he addressed a veterans group in North Carolina. “I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,” said the former president. “And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

Gee, what stuff could that be? And I wonder which two candidates he means?

Rather than let the candidate himself respond, retired Air Force Genreral Tony McPeak flung the dirt back. “I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I’ve had enough of it,” McPeak said. The Clintons of course screamed outrage (Uncle Joe is Satan for members of the old left, though a lot of Obama’s younger supporters might be hard pressed to tell you who he was) but what I thought was most interesting was seeing Obama, standing on the stage with his arms folded, while McPeak took his wacks. Maybe instead of one Bobby, Obama will find a chorus of them. Critics of the critics, fighting the armies of the night.

Sure, Obama looked a little awkward letting someone else fight his battle for him. But as Bill Richardson said, standing with the senator at another rally when he endorsed the “once in a lifetime” candidate, his speech Tuesday contained “the eloquence, sincerity and optimism we have come to expect of him.” It’s hard to handle all that and a switchblade, too.

The finest moment in Barack Obama’s transcendent speech on race yesterday was probably when he evoked his grandmother. For those of you who missed it, take time and watch it with your children later. But let me quote from the man himself (and the fact that he actually wrote most of this speech himself means we stand to elect, if nothing else, a great writer to the White House). The set-up, of course, was the flack he’s been getting for statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who critics have asked him to disown:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

“These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

We all have one of those grandmas, somebody in our family or in our past who loved us and let us down with their prejudices and their attitudes. It’s not a black thing or a white thing; it’s a human thing. Obama is not counting merely on the subtlety of his argument that black men of Wright’s generation might be entitled to some anti-American feelings (fear of black rage is something Republicans are dying to pounce on); he’s counting on our common, flawed humanity, and that enough voters of all races will recognize themselves, and their larger families, in his dilemma.

Was the speech too lofty for Joe Sixpack? Can’t tell yet. It’s probably not the kind of speech that is going to push him past Hillary in parts of Pennsylvania (of which longtime Clinton supporter James Carville famously said, “It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”) but I really think he was speaking more to the superdelegates, who represent not only Hillary’s only hope but who are also super-Democrats themselves, men and women who drank the Kool-Aid of our party — the ideals and, yes, the idealism — a long time ago.

There were a lot of ways Obama could have tackled the Wright problem, which Fox News and other hate mongers are determined to keep alive. He could have ignored it, he could have repudiated him and everything he stands for. Instead he gambled with a reaction that was complicated and intelligent and emotional, all at once, as if inviting us as voters and Americans to join him on a higher playing field. Do we have the guts to go there?

If you thought it was going to be simple with Florida, well then you have a really bad memory. That state’s Democratic Party has declared, on behalf of its voters, that Florida doesn’t want to vote again. Once was quite enough. Even if it was a sort of a pantomime equivalent of voting, in which actual ballots were cast but the results were determined ahead of time to be meaingless (which didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from showing up and acting as if she had won the sweepstakes). They were being punished by the national party for having held its primary early and the state’s poohbahs have tossed the ball back over the fence — like those mimes playing tennis in Blow-Up.

“This doesn’t mean that Democrats are giving up on Florida voters,” the FDP assured everyone in a memo. “It means that a solution will have to come from the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, which is scheduled to meet again in April.”

As much as that committee, headed by DNC leader Howard Dean, would like to toss that imaginary ball to someone else, the math finally frames the debate and gives us all an out (even those of us who didn’t do so well in math): Obama has more candidates and it’s impossible for Hillary to catch up. He also has a greater percentage of the popular vote and, barring a bizarre and complete turnaround, the equivalent of all Obama supporters staying home for all the remaining primaries, there is no way she can catch up there, either. Her argument that the Democratic nominee needs to win Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida to take the White House means a whole lot less when polls continue to show Obama beating McCain more handily, even in those states, than she would. What, Hillary supporters are going to stay home in November if she doesn’t get the nomination? Never happen. Whereas a good number of Obama’s troops, many of them first time voters, would certainly have reason to think the game rigged if the candidate with the most votes and delegates somehow didn’t get the nomination. Kind of reminds you of the 2000 presidential election, when the candidate with the most votes lost…

There is nothing wrong with representatives making a momentous decision as long as they truly represent the will of the people. Anyone who watched HBO’s John Adams last night got a good historical reminder of how the craven King-fearing representatives of some colonies almost kept us from fighting for freedom. (If you did miss the first two episodes of this bracing series, it’s being repeated on hundreds of HBO spin-offs as you read this, including HBO En Espanol. Watching our founding fathers arguing the fine points of the Declaration of Independence in Spanish makes me feel like I have entered one of Lou Dobbs’ nightmares.)

As much as I enjoyed the series more bold-faced portrayals — Paul Giamatti’s dyspeptic Adams, Tom Wilkinson’s rascally Benjamin Franklin — I was really taken with Broadway actor Stephen Dillane’s quiet take on Thomas Jefferson. It’s how Montgomery Clift might have played him: so still you have to pay attention. When you have the right ideas you don’t have to scream and strut. Something for all presidential contenders to remember.

Mother of mercy, could this be the end of Obama?

It’s hard to tell how political scandals are going to play and what kind of shelf life they will ultimately have. Some like Spitzer’s (below) come out of nowhere and swallow up whole careers and families in a tsunami-like instant. Others start off troubling and just get more so. The news about Obama’s break with his former pastor was getting a lot of play on the evening news last night, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper devoting his entire broadcast to it. and each of the network news program putting it at the top of their political coverage. The junior senator from Illinois made the rounds of the programs himself, telling anyone who would listen that he never heard the Reverend Jeremiah Wright declare this country ran on racism, or say, just days after 9.11, that the attacks were the result of US foreign policy karma.

What’s troubling is not the way the contretemps got heated up, either. John McCain pushed an editorial from the Wall Street Journal on reporters (so that’s where they get their ideas!) and Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News (who still haven’t forgiven Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin) fanned the flames, sending thousands to see for themselves on YouTube. No, the thing that’s the most unnerving about this fiasco is the Clinton camp’s silence.

It’s no secret that part of her strategy has been to hang in there until something stuck to Obama, and this time it wasn’t even mud she or one of her minions tossed. (Neat how the Wright story pushed that Ferraro unpleasantness off the front page.) They have claimed for months that only once the press started looking hard at Obama’s background would his mettle be tested and in this case they might be right. Why wasn’t Obama’s campaign out ahead of this one? Given the rev’s shoot-from-the-hip style, in the already shoot-from-the-hip world of black preachers, shouldn’t someone have had a look at those tapes themselves? Now the press is sure to play gotcha, looking for proof that Obama was in church during a sermon when Wright was on record saying something controversial.

The great pity is that Obama wanted his campaign to get beyond the race issue and some of us have joined him in that hope (see more below). Now a bunch of potential voters are going to hear the same sound bites of Wright and confuse his rhetoric with the message of the candidate. Context means next to nothing in a political year: of course our history is racist, just as its obvious that Al Qaeda’s hatred of the US stems from our foreign policy history. But truth and nuance won’t get you to the White House.

The only good news in all of this was more bad news: stories of the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns pushed the Obama-Wright story below the fold ,or later in the program, and the dire predictions of many economists made the rantings of a retired reverend seem quite trivial indeed. On Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, the essential oatmeal of evening newscasts, Newsweek’s Jane Bryant Quinn was one of a chorus voices on the air last night telling Americans to fasten their seat belts.

“If you look at where America is in the world, relatively speaking, we are getting poorer, because we’ve been a debtor nation for so long,” Quinn told Judy Woodruff. “And the dollar going down means that internationally we are getting to be a poorer country, and we are not doing as well as we did in the past. This is going to be a hard thing for Americans to face.”

Feel better?