This is a human Lincoln, an ordinary Lincoln, a Lincoln we could all aspire to be, when touched as we must be by the better angels of our nature.

The most important point about a Transformation Election, as opposed to the Transactional Elections normally held, is that it's not close. A new consensus emerges, a solid majority on one side of a whole set of assumptions, some of them born in power as part of a previous AntiThesis regime, others brand new, born of movements which have never before achieved power.

Anyone who writes that the work of Amanda at Pandagon is somehow further to the left than Fox News is to the right is politically deluded. If you think Fox News is "fair and balanced" you're unbalanced. They are propaganda. And so are all the people who feed them their talking points.

Because TV dominates modern campaigns, this part of the campaign has taken on the form of an American Idol-like audition, with Iowa and New Hampshire voters, along with state conventions, as the focus groups.

The Democratic primary for President is for Big Dogs only. That's the way it is when there's no incumbent and your troops are expected to win.

Instead of focusing on Jobs, and his battle with the music industry, Thompson would be better served focusing on the forces that made him, and those that can really break him. A single Chinese innovator, a single Chinese teenager, could easily overthrow the World of Jobs at a stroke, by designing something cool and bringing the intellectual property back to the place where it's manufactured.

The genius of the Dean campaign was not its Web effort, but the way the people within his campaign drew people into their world via the blog, the day-to-day grind of following the candidate, of communicating with him, of trying to build something. The posts on his blog became an interactive online novel. There is no indication Obama is willing to go that way. It's all talk among yourselves, while I ride above the fray.

There is one rule for Republicans and another for Democrats because the Nixon Thesis is assumed true by everyone on the dominant medium, regardless of their supposed politics. Understanding that, fighting that, and ending that is the key political battle of 2007, not the New Hampshire primary.

The wall-to-wall coverage of this "story" speaks to the deadness of the TV soul today, a certain deadness in our society. We care more for the lucky, those born with or falling into money, than we do about real people, real problems, reality. It's a sick fantasy world that plays out on our boob tubes every day, and we're the boobs.

The real news was made at halftime, only no one noticed.