A New Landscape...

Today Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News wrote a beautiful essay on the Clinton and Obama campaigns, on New Hampshire and the expectations and surprises there. This year I've found myself excited about America - for the first time since leaving the Republican Party six years ago (at age 23, a burned out, disillusioned ex-Alex P. Keaton).

The soaring speeches we're hearing in 2008's Democratic Primaries are moving me from cautious cynicism to genuine hope about our future, our freedom and the potential of the American people to do something good and redemptive in the world.

Williams' article is worth reading: HERE

Williams Writes, On Clinton...
Hillary Clinton was bloodied in New Hampshire. The people of New Hampshire saw it and didn't like it. They saw assumptions forming and didn't like them. Some felt they were being told what to think: the race was decided, Hillary was desperate and inauthentic. Worst of all — and this was made very clear to me by more than one person — when some in the media quietly doubted that Hillary Clinton's emotions at that roundtable were real (there was quiet snickering about an "acting job" born of an urgent need to seem normal) it was proof to them that cynicism had taken hold of the politics/media realm, and they simply refused to believe that.

And On Obama...
That day, I saw people embrace Obama the way people embrace loved ones returning from foreign battlefields. I saw people with small children, brought along simply so their parents could years later tell them, to the point of predictable annoyance, "You were there." Losing in New Hampshire may well make Obama a better candidate. While it's the kind of thing that is always said at times like these by those of us whose names have never appeared on a ballot, I think it might just be true in this case.


please read more about my thoughts on the evolution of Christianity at http://www.emergingchristianity.blogspot.com/