But, ah, Obama is very foxy. What defines the sensibility on display in his books and his speeches is his variousness. His readiness to put himself in the shoes of that Sister wearing blue contact lens or the boys dreaming they’ll be Little Wayne or that Midwestern boy – Shamus was it? – off to be Marine or…O’s variousness is the very thing that makes Wretch think he’s a hustler.

A word on Berlin – He fancied himself a fox But I bet he’d recognize he was a piker comarted to O. Berlin tended to write good essays about Heine, Tolstoy and figures from the past. He wasn’t all that penetrating about the writers/thinkers of our own time. A little removed…- He certainly wasn’t as alive to the range of feeling in a room as Obama is…O’s eyes/ears travel. BErlin was a much more studied, bookish sort. What’s the point of such comparisons between a dead liberal don and live liberal pol?…Well O is out to embody and revive the values that Berlin tried to write up to. My guess is that he’s likely to be a more significant figure than Berlin in the history of the liberal imagination.

RE the Black Swan – again – I’d say there’s a case that O is the Black Swan. Could anyone have imagined at the moment of, say, “Mission Acomplished” that a few years on GEorge Bush would be a heavy drag on the chance that John McCain might could stop a candidate who opposed that Mission from becoming the first African American president?

Not the first person to say this but Nouri started giving O the Out WEEKS ago as I noted here. I wish my man would acknowledge the Surge worked – and that we now may have “good” options in Iraq. But – he’s a pol not a lamb – Gioven the fear of the flip-flop critique and the difficulty of incarnating liberal-mindedness in a world of blowhards…Can’t say I’m shocked O is locked down on Iraq right now…

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