Obama is the high risk, high reward candidate. By Nov. he can have everyone sitting around the campfire singing Stimpy's "happy happy, joy joy" song & win 40 states. Or his campaign could be an endless string of rookie mistakes (some of which he's already made vs Hillary) & lose 40 states.

There it is for you. Wanna play it safe? Hillary. Wanna take a chance? Obama.

This is only in terms of winning a match up against Hog Jowls McCain and his "100 Year War". As for the substance of who would actually make the best president, my favourite is Ron Paul.

Yeah, he seems to be orbiting Neptune with that whole gold standard thing. And I had a really, really hard time forgiving him for voting in favour, on all 4 counts, of impeaching B. Clinton over a matter that was beneath trivial.

But not only has he been consistently been against the Iraq war, as opposed to turning against it only after That Mandrill in the White House dropped from 85% to 25%, he's against the whole premise of EVER going to war unless the very survival of the Republic is in danger if we don't. And that's a position not even Obama has taken. And it's an issue that's worth more than all the others put together.  

My response:

1. When you look behind the sound bites, there is real substance to his focus on change, both in his policies (which really aren't much different than Hillary's) and in the way he goes about politics.
2. His political goal and his means to attaining that goal are all about bringing the country together in a large coalition to discover its commonalities and bring about that change. That might sound vacuous, but when you look at his experience in community organizing, he really has been doing that his whole life.

Sure, he knows he'll be hit hard by the Republicans and entrenched corporate interests. It's not going to be all Kumbaya. But he is calculating that it will be easier to create change--and we'll create more lasting change--if he enlists citizens in national politics. If he organizes them to work together for universal health care, to fight poverty, for affordable higher education, and to create a more humane and truly secure foreign policy.

3. The alternative to this kind of politics is the Karl Rove politics we've been used to. Aim for 50% plus one and use cheap political tactics to slice and dice the electorate and turn just enough people against your opponent that you win the election. Then work the levers of power to push your agenda through. Hillary knows how to play this game and that's what she'll be forced to do because she has a ceiling on the number of independents and Republicans she can get to cross over and vote for her.

Hillary may be able to win the election that way. She may be able to get some good things done in Washington that way. But she won't be able to change things on the scale that Obama could.

You are breaking up the "electable" argument from the post-inauguration argument, but I think you have to look at it holistically. We are at a point in our history where the nation is ready for serious change. We're talking once in a generation political realignment. Obama can tap into that, win a huge electoral majority, and bring huge Congressional majorities along with him--maybe even a filibuster-proof Senate. (That's one reason why all these red state governors and members of Congress have endorsed him. They know he can win their states and bring others along with him on his coattails while Hillary can't.)

Obama can then build on that electoral coalition to bring about the "change" everyone is speaking of because he'll have changed the nation's political culture. If there's one thing we've learned in the last 8 years, it's that the political culture of this country matters a great deal and it is more often than not set by the president.

Whew.