Roger Cohen writes:

Bill Clinton’s latest whining about press coverage of his wife, Mitt Romney’s latest broadside on immigration, the various spins of the Iran intelligence volte-face, and the sterile who’s-got-more-God competition between candidates, look like the machinations of a disoriented power.

The United States needs a new beginning. It cannot lie in the Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties, nor in the macho militarism of Republicans who see war without end. It has to involve a fresh face that will reconcile the country with itself and the world, get over divisions — internal and external — and speak with honesty about American glory and shame.

New York Times columnists aren’t allowed to endorse particular presidential candidates, but this looks like an implicit endorsement of Obama. And it’s the best reason to support Obama that I can think of.

I still haven’t made up my mind, but it’s ideas like this one that make me want to vote for him.

Next year, for the first time, I’ll be voting in a presidential primary. In 2000 and 2004, I was a New Jersey resident, and the state’s primary wasn’t until June, so there was no point. But the 2008 New York primary is going to be on Super-Duper Tuesday, so my vote will finally matter.

Knowing that I’d finally have a chance to vote in a primary that mattered, I finally registered as a Democrat over the summer. In the past, I was reluctant to do so because I prided myself on my independence. But I realized that I’ve never voted for a single Republican in my life (except for Mike Bloomberg in 2005, which barely counts, and he’s not even a Republican anymore), so I figured it was time to finally declare — especially if I could vote in an election that mattered.

Therefore, for the first time, my decision on whom to support for the Democratic nomination will not be merely theoretical.

I’ve taken several online quizzes that purport to match you to the candidate who holds positions closest to your own (this is one of the slickest; here are two others), and my closest match keeps coming up as Dennis Kucinich. But there are other factors to consider, such as a president’s political savvy and his ability to get legislation passed. If I thought Kucinich had either of those, or if I thought he had even a wisp of a chance in a general election, I might vote for him. But he doesn’t and I won’t.

The choice really comes down to Clinton vs. Obama vs. Edwards.

Clinton is the best prepared candidate in the race. My concerns are that (1) she represents business as usual, and (2) there’s a whole Republican attack machine ready for her candidacy.

The Republicans seem to relish the thought of running against Hillary. On the other hand, paradoxically, her campaign seems like the one most ready to fight back against the Republicans. So it really comes down to this question: when you pit the Republicans’ powerful anti-Hillary fervor against Team Hillary’s powerful campaign skills, which wins? I’m not sure.

The main alternative to her is Obama, for whom Andrew Sullivan and Frank Rich both make convincing arguments. He could possibly transcend the culture-war arguments, and the Republicans might have a tough time in a campaign against him. On the other hand, does he have the political savvy necessary to get an agenda through Congress and to handle foreign policy? Maybe.

What makes me most skeptical about Obama is that he seems clueless about something like Social Security. Paul Krugman, whose opinion I respect, says that Obama has been played for a sucker on that issue. If that’s true, it lowers my confidence in him.

Still, I’ve been leaning more toward him lately instead of Clinton. We’ll see.

As for Edwards, he’s in the mix for me only because I’m not totally satisfied with either Clinton or Obama. I liked Edwards a lot back in 2004, and I like him a lot now. He seems like a true economic liberal. I’m just not sure he’s the right man for the times.

Whoever I pick, it’ll be nice to know that my primary vote next year will finally count for something.

I wonder about the future of “The Daily Show.”

I don’t mean because of the writers’ strike — hopefully that will end and the show will come back before, say, next summer’s presidential conventions.

What I wonder about is whether, if a Democrat wins the presidency, “The Daily Show” will be as popular in 2009 as it is right now.

The Bush administration, while it has ruined the country and the world, has been a boon to Jon Stewart. It’s not just that Bush is so idiotic and loathed that the headlines write themselves; it’s not just that Stewart’s audience is pretty liberal and that we love to see Bush and other Republicans get skewered. (I always laugh at Stewart’s fake Bush cackle, no matter how many times he does it.) The main reason Stewart’s popularity has grown in the last few years is because we feel so angry at what Bush has done, so aghast that he’s been able to get away with it, and so powerless to change anything about it — so outraged and depressed at the same time — that the only non-destructive outlet we have is laughter. We’ve needed Jon Stewart during the Bush years, in a deep psychological sense.

What happens after?

There was a telling moment on the show this past summer. Stewart did a sequence of Hillary Clinton jokes. This was before Obama and Edwards started getting more aggressive against her, before the media started picking up the “Hillary’s making missteps” narrative. Outrage against the Iraq “surge” was at its height, General Petraeus’s testimony was approaching, and we still felt pumped about there being a chance to turn the surge around — before Congress folded and apathy set in again. We were angry.

And Stewart did some Hillary Clinton jokes.

The audience reaction was tepid, at best. Stewart eventually had to tweak the audience.

I guess it’s partly that the jokes weren’t very funny, but it’s also that the audience wasn’t with Stewart. We wanted more cathartic comedic exasperation at the state of the world; we weren’t looking for anti-Hillary jokes.

Maybe it will be different if Hillary gets elected. She’ll hold power, she’ll be the president, so she’ll be a legitimate comedic target. (The powerful always get skewed.)

When Stewart made fun of Hillary that night, it almost seemed as if he was trying to remind us that he’s an equal-opportunity offender — warning us that we shouldn’t get too comfortable.

Barack Obama campaigned at a rally in Washington Square Park last night. We live a block north of the park, and I could hear noise and music coming from there yesterday after work. I wondered what was going on until I remembered. I didn’t go to the rally – I’m curious about Obama, but (1) I had therapy, and (2) I don’t want to stand in a crowd for two hours before Obama shows up.

There were thousands of people in the park, though. The campaign has a slideshow of photos.

Here’s a fascinating piece about gay software mogul Tim Gill and his efforts to defeat anti-gay political candidates through under-the-radar donations. Key paragaphs:

Gill decided to find out how he could become more effective and enlisted as his political counselor an acerbic lawyer and former tobacco lobbyist named Ted Trimpa, who is Colorado’s answer to Karl Rove. Trimpa believes that the gay-rights community directs too much of its money to thoroughly admirable national candidates who don’t need it, while neglecting less compelling races that would have a far greater impact on gay rights—a tendency he calls “glamour giving.” Trimpa cited the example of Barack Obama: an attractive candidate, solid on gay rights, and viscerally exciting to donors. It feels good to write him a check. An analysis of Obama’s 2004 Senate race, which he won by nearly fifty points, had determined that gays contributed more than $500,000. “The temptation is always to swoon for the popular candidate,” Trimpa told me, “but a fraction of that money, directed at the right state and local races, could have flipped a few chambers. ‘Just because he’s cute’ isn’t a strategy.”

Together, Gill and Trimpa decided to eschew national races in favor of state and local ones, which could be influenced in large batches and for much less money. Most antigay measures, they discovered, originate in state legislatures. Operating at that level gave them a chance to “punish the wicked,” as Gill puts it—to snuff out rising politicians who were building their careers on antigay policies, before they could achieve national influence. Their chief cautionary example of such a villain is Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who once compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex (and was finally defeated last year, at a cost of more than $20 million). Santorum got his start working in the state legislature. As Gill and Trimpa looked at their evolving plan, it seemed realistic. “The strategic piece of the puzzle we’d been missing—consistent across almost every legislature we examined—is that it’s often just a handful of people, two or three, who introduce the most outrageous legislation and force the rest of their colleagues to vote on it,” Gill explained. “If you could reach these few people or neutralize them by flipping the chamber to leaders who would block bad legislation, you’d have a dramatic effect.”

Tim Gill is my new hero.

I’m still working on my narrative of our D.C. trip; it’s turning out to be much longer than I’d intended.

In the meantime, if you didn’t get a chance to see them last night, read the speeches of Barack Obama and Teresa Heinz Kerry. Parts of them were pretty magnificent, even if Teresa looked like she was wearing a Starfleet uniform or something.