I agree, and it's unfortunate. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the key to success for the next president is his/her ability to build relationships nationally and internationally. It's an absolute must economically, as more free market economies emerge all over the world.

I think the Clintons are natural born dividers. It may have been good at one time in America's past but it's the last thing this country needs now and in the future.

In the debates, I noticed often that Senator Clinton would say "I do this on college costs" or "I do this on health care." Others said that sort of thing occasionally, but she said it a lot.

It's an odd phrasing, because, of course, she wasn't doing that thing the day she said "I do it."

What she meant was: I put it in a memo about what I would like to see happen. As though writing the memo was political reality.

Eventually, I decided she fundamentally thought that was true. Politics isn't mainly enacting laws and making them work, because gridlock makes that impossible. It isn't finding the motivating words and the organizing strategies to end the gridlock: big change is a pipe dream. Politics is Rove/Penn microtrends because a mega-movement isn't imaginable. At most, in this approach, politics is announcing positions in order to capture tiny demographic slices and piece together a fragile majority for a single election.

In that view of the world, barking at Congress makes sense. It's a posture that might impress a few more voters.

From the same assumptions, of course, Obama looks soft, and Obama-backers look delusional, and Obama speeches are just words. The notion of organizing a movement with a million donors, crowds of 35,000, conversations springing up on street corners, and music videos popping up unbidden on user-driven websites--and having that movement be 279 delegates from the nomination--is impossible. It can't be happening.

We've got to thaw that world view. Not stomp it and beat it, because that's the dividers' theory. But work on it and work near it until the warmth of what we're doing changes the whole process.

This amplifies a question of mine that I keep asking but getting no answers. With all the "tough" questioning in debates and "press" conferences, why doesn't anyone ask Hillary about her track record on health care and hold her accountable for her failure? She says she has a plan, but is it going to be any easier than it was back in '93? And how does this failure make her more ready to be the President on day one... so she can fill George Bush's shoes?