Politicians get unduly visionary from time to time. We do well to keep an eye on them while they choke with tears and manufactured enthusiasm. A president is one man with one term and a wilderness of challenges and competing priorities to grapple with. He'll get some things done. Most others he won't. Some of the things he gets done we'll later regret -- as may he himself.
3. It's youth versus old age.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Slim and trim as Obama may be, and white-haired and battered as John McCain may look, the mismatch may not work to Obama's advantage.
Against the late -- politically late -- Mrs. Clinton, Obama shone. They had little, it turned out, to talk about. On all important philosophical points they agreed. Their jabs at each other were slight and trivial, large and material as they seemed to the media at the time.
McCain may struggle to avoid looking -- in the media's eyes -- like the old fool who couldn't find his false teeth if they bit him. And yet, in debate about the country's present and future, a Navy veteran of the Hanoi Hilton will carry an aura: one of courage and patriotic commitment and inner strength.
This is not to disparage Obama. It is to say that maturity -- yes, and suffering as an ingredient in the formation of that maturity -- are of large account in the presentation of argument, and of one's self as living, breathing argument.
Who knows, really, how this thing -- this election -- is going to go? No one does. Believe no one who says the contrary.