The hope of Obama's candidacy is not just about a future administration, but about a campaign that is already being transformed. I don't think Republican attacks are going to work in the same way as they have in the past. I'm thinking here of McCain's key comment: that Obama is "eloquent but empty". Here's the problem.
First, this kind of character-driven personal attack ignores, in a completely untenable way, our real situation: the failed policies, catastrophic war and public despair that Bush-Cheney has left us with. Everytime McCain attacks Obama in these personal terms he ignores, and thus slights, such overarching social and political realities.
Second, when McCain tries to ignore these realities, and attack Obama's character, he's also attacking you and me. I know that I feel angry when I hear this. And I know how to act on this anger. I'll give Obama more money and more time. And so will thousands more. When Obama lost New Hampshire, his donations spiked up. Thinking beyond the primary, I don't think there's any limit to what the grass-roots, small-donor infrastructure that Obama has built can't catalyze. We're not going away. There will be mass voting registration drives. Continual, unprecedented levels of donations, of money and time. And who knows what else: Obama is intent on leading his campaign as an organizer.
The combination of this -- those unavoidable realities that Bush has left us with, and this unbelievable grass-roots and net-roots support for Obama -- make every, single attack that McCain tries a huge risk. He can't ignore the 30% or less approval rating for his president, his war, and the extreme ideology that got us here, by sniping at a courageous man who stands at the top of a giant organizational structure, with unpredecented power to give money, time, and, unprecedented technologies to communicate with (like the internets).
To begin this great election by saying Obama is "eloquent but empty" -- it insults me, and I'm sure many others who are reading this. It ignores the fundamental problems that John McCain is massively complicitous with, and in no position to solve. It isolates a black man running for president -- that most historically-exciting possibility -- and tries to deflate him, literally. Obama attacked makes me feel attacked, and in that very feeling is the untapped, still largely unexplored potential of the Obama campaign to give us a kind of mass organizing that we've seen before.