Out of respect for the feelings of my friends (you know who you are) who supported Hillary Clinton, I’ve suppressed my celebration of Barack Obama’s assuming the Democratic nomination for a week now. I don’t see Obama’s success as a triumph of misogyny so much as a victory over the kind of overly crafted politics that has far too long been the hallmark of Democratic presidential politics.

Goodbye Mark Penn with your micro demographic groups. Goodbye Terry McAuliffe with your money bags. Goodbye Bob Shrum with your advice to waffle opposition to this obscene war in Iraq. Goodbye James Carville with your mean and petty loyalties. Let’s hope none of them finds work at Camp Obama.

Follow up:

As for attacking while you’re down, maybe Clinton’s loss shows how little tolerance people have for that now. Whoever thought negative ads would win her new supporters should forfeit his fee. I’ll concede the attacks against Clinton were even more savage than hers against him, but they didn’t come from Obama’s team, and he stands taller for that.

My feelings toward Ellen Malcolm and Emily’s List, which has helped so many pro-choice women candidates, are more tender. Ellen’s a giver, not a taker, but the idea behind Early Money (Is Like Yeast) seems to have served Clinton poorly this time. Her well-heeled donors maxed out prematurely and the money was not well spent (see Paragraph 2). Of course, it hurt me to disagree with Gloria Steinem, who I hope will come around to support the other candidate who sees women as equal and valuable. And I applaud Donna Brazile for the way she negotiated between her friends in both camps.

Howard Dean should feel good, because as much as he’s been criticized for failing to rein in the unruly Democratic Party, his fifty-state strategy is paying off. Maybe some of the South will blow off the Republican exploitation of racial paranoia. Maybe the working class that has so often supported policies against its own interests will rise up in Kansas and Nebraska and Minnesota. This is not to say that Republicans will concede this election without a fight—or without the election shenanigans we’ve come to anticipate.

I confess I felt the same euphoria in 1992 when Bill Clinton was nominated. I was moved by his articulated vision for a more just world and his long-ago opposition to the Vietnam war. I was impressed by his education at Georgetown and Oxford and Yale. I was encouraged that in spite of being a Southerner, he had good friends in the African-American community. I was even excited that he had so much energy for talking into the night about everything that interested him, and everything seemed to. But with those heady credentials came appetites he couldn’t reign in, and somehow Clinton never quite found the focus he needed to become a great president. But if raw intelligence does not guarantee greatness, it sure beats willful ignorance, as George W. Bush has amply demonstrated. And we should continually thank Bill Clinton for the gift of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

While my optimism for an Obama presidency is high, I have no idea how his many talents and inevitable human weaknesses will play out. I’m hoping his similarities to the Kennedy brothers stops at the bedroom door. We don’t know whether the advisors who surround Obama have expanded and sharpened his vision or advanced their pet causes at our expense. Or whether men like David Plouffe and David Axelrod have greater vision and higher integrity than the tread-worn consultants who have failed other Democrats. Or whether Samantha Power can keep a check on her candor and Susan Rice can prove herself wiser than her cousin Condi. We can rest assured that corporate America is busy calculating how to hold onto the perks it has been handed.

Equally important to Obama’s success or failure is the role of the mainstream media. Certainly, if the media had been as tough on George W. Bush as they were on Bill Clinton, he would never have served a second term. So, will the most recent criticisms leveled at the media by Bush’s former press secretary Scott McClellan make them more analytical or simply more bellicose? Rupert Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journal and shows none of the former owners’ restraint in shaping the news as well as its opinion pages. While it can’t be called mainstream, Murdoch’s Fox News is still an unofficial organ of the Republican Party; its president, Roger Ailes, used to be a consultant to Republican candidates Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. If you’ve seen how Fox edited those clips of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, you have a clue about what we may be in for.

The Federal Communications Commission long ago abandoned promoting fairness on our airwaves. General Electric, which also dabbles in defense, pollution and bad mortgages, still owns NBC (and MSNBC). CBS regularly trammels its long legacy of hard-hitting reporting, and at ABC, the vacuum created by the death of Peter Jennings and the departure of Ted Koppel is apparent.

We voters need to turn away from sleazy journalism as if it would add five pounds to our mid-sections. Since we can’t return to the news environment of yesteryear, we must find a way to create a space in the public arena that is truly fair and balanced. We need new streams of revenue to fund the kind of reporting that uncovers more than the latest celebrity hideaways and the police blotter. Net neutrality should not fall off our radar.Ideally, we should all be media watchdogs, but it’s easier to attack missteps than to uncover stories ignored because they didn’t fit the agenda of a network or a newspaper.

Lately, my attention is on print magazines like the New Yorker and The Nation, and on PBS programs like NOW, Bill Moyer’s Journal, and Frontline, although I know they reach small audiences. Online I love my http://www.alternet.org and my http://www.continuumnews.com and my http://www.tomdispatch.com.

And, Senator Obama, I know you didn’t ask, but here’s my advice for the upcoming prom: Defer to John McCain as you would the school principal with whom you disagree. Treat the likes of Burson-Marstellar as chaperones, polite at a distance. Regard consultants like Carville and Shrum as if they were spiking the punch bowl. Don’t step outside for a smoke with Bill Clinton. And dance with the one you came with.

No charge.