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…

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!”