Camelot.
The Sunshine Socialist.
The Peanut Revolutionary.
The Big Hope from Little Hope.
And now for the fifth time in nearly fifty years a democrat is about to take the Oval Office.
This is the giddy time, the happy place, where the rhetoric still resounds and the dream still lives, where hope soars over the dark rocks of reality.
Yes, We Can!
Perhaps Barack Obama really is “The Change We Can Believe.”
But history isn’t on his side.
Who knows what John Kennedy might have achieved if a bullet hadn’t shattered Camelot?
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was born of that assassination. Despite sweeping social reforms the bog of Vietnam left him unable and perhaps even unwilling to seek another term.
Jimmy Carter’s dreams of a heightened humanity for Washington fell with those helicopters in that failed rescue attempt in Iran.
And despite presiding over one of the best economies of the generation, the powerful one-two punch that was President and Mrs. Bill Clinton’s goal of reforming health care ran head first into the battlements of entrenched politics and special interests.
Those fortresses still stand ready for the Charge of the Obama Brigade.
And he faces his Vietnams as well, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then there are the intense challenges facing the economy; a population in dire need of credit and pocket cash, ailing banking and auto industries, and a Dow with a bad habit of veering wildly with all the stability of a drunken frat rat come Sunday morning 2 AM.
I don’t mean to downplay the early enthusiasm.
Hey, the better we can feel about ourselves the better off we’ll all be.
The truth is that Barack Obama is both powerful intellectual and gifted orator, skills that took him from humble beginnings to the doorstep of the White House.
But now the hard part.