The sport of politics. The politics of sport.

Ah, back to the grind. I took a few days off from the blogosphere, because I’m in that mode shared by millions of American voters: looking for a day job. Blogging is great, but I wanna get PAID, people! (Funniest thing? Democratic and “progressive” organizations won’t hire me — could it be that I’m too Independent? Which would be dumb, because we Independents are saving their butts this year! No, I’m not ashamed to make this observation. Progressive is as progressive does.)

Anyway … For this little entry, I’m just going to pull together my observations over the past 10 days of the so-called “silly season” in politics.

The Democratic Party continues the tortuous path of rebranding itself as something other than government-as-parent. You have Hillary Clinton on one hand, ambitious to a fault; and Barack Obama on the other, who it is becoming increasingly clear is the coolest customer on the block. Should he end up with the Democratic nomination, he will face another cool customer — Republican contender John McCain, who has had recent dustups with a range of antagonists from the New York Times to America’s increasingly dimwitted right wing.

I’ll get to McCain’s travails with the Right and the latest Democratic debate in a separate posting. For now, I’ll note that we are witnessing a historic shift in the “image” of the Democratic Party, and the Bill ‘n’ Hill Show is just the most overt evidence of an old guard holding onto power and influence by the skin of its teeth. Obama is about a change in attitude, not to mention a change in scenery. People are mystified that he is supposedly so “liberal” — and few in the press have made it a point to underscore how absurd that charge is — yet he can attract Independents and Republicans to his cause.

So many pundits in the professional political class have been trying to apply a sort of academic-style logic to the 2008 presidential race. As I have said before, this just shows how out of touch they are with so-called “average” voters. But it’s really more than that: they are out of touch with both the intangible flow of perception and the power of intangibles.

The rise to true contender status of Barack Obama, and even of John McCain, represents an organic evolution of the American voting psyche. The voices of belligerent right-wing outrage and prissy left-wing cultural hypocrisy are ceding the stage to the fed-up armies of common sense.

Voters — many disgusted with their own gullibility regarding the cardboard-cutout style of patriotism hawked by the Bush administration — are finally growing up. As a result, they will be faced in November with a choice between two coherent, classy, sensible candidates: something I’m not sure we’ve seen in my lifetime.

No doubt that’s what Michelle Obama was talking about when she talked about being truly proud of America for the first time in her adult life. The usual freaks in the “Don’t criticize America if you know what’s good for you” brigade tried to make hay out of her heartfelt moment of sincerity. If the nation is lucky, voters won’t let those dumbasses define the political discussion.

The point is that all of the focus groups, opinion polls and incessant speculation the political class relies on to pay its bills is SO old school. The kind of intuitive understanding of human politics that is more relevant to what we are watching unfold is the province of millions of citizens outside those elitist media coccoons. We are ahead of the game the pundits seem to think they have all figured out.

Yours Truly, A.F. Cook