HOW MUCH WIERDER CAN IT GET?

A lot, I'm afraid.

But the latest wierdness for me is McCain's recent speeches in which he says that Obama is "the most liberal candidate for president ever" or "in history"!!!

This is a guy, Obama, who has tons of top Republicans saying they will vote for him, some of whom I'd bet will be a part of his administration if he's elected.

He's also a guy who from the beginning of his campaign had many Illinois Republican State Senators saying how great he was to work with when he was a state Senator, how they had found him to be less partisan than most Democrats and able to compromise. Many of them also support his candidacy for president.

This is a guy many leftwing Democrats find too moderate, to generous in his praise and acceptance of Republican politicians and positions (note how many times in his speeches and in the debates he said he "agreed" with McCain etc.).

This is one of the least "liberal" and least "lefwing" Democratic politicians I've seen in my lifetime.

But even if he were as "liberal" and "leftwing" as McCain (or actually his Bush Junior speechwriters) is saying, does anyone who has been alive for more than a few decades believe for a second that Obama is more liberal than FDR? or LBJ? Let alone Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Dukakis, and almost any other candidate for the presidency from the Democratic Party in at least a century?

The closest he comes to is Bill Clinton, one of the least liberal Democratic presidents. Like Bill, Obama is more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. And, like Bill, he is an incredibly intelligent man. But unlike Bill, he doesn't seem to be so insecure about his self image that he needs to make everyone love him, including interns.

In many ways, despite his being one of our youngest candidates for president (which Bill was too) Obama seems like one of the most mature (especially in comparison with McCain's yes erratic behavior). A result, it seems, from the incredible circumstances of his life—being identified physically as "black" despite his white mother, and being raised partially by white grandparents but in multi-racial Hawaii, as well as partially by his white mother in Indonesia, attending a variety of schools with a mix of ethnicities and worldviews, ending up using his intelligence and talents at Harvard among a white elite and in Chicago as an organizer among both the black and white poor and working-class.

The man has a broader understanding, from personal experience, of the world and its people as it truly is, than any other candidate for president in my lifetime—except for the trauma of war. But, if you check out history, the most successful war presidents we've had—Lincoln and FDR—had no experience of the trauma of war, so that seems like an asset too.