"...akin to FDR's New Deal rolled into Lyndon Johnson's Great Society"

Even though I am absolutely dazzled by most of the stuff OUR President has done so far and the sheer speed of it, both to undo The Bush Darktime and fast-forward the future, I would never gush about him like Mark Morford does. But I'll sure as shit link to him so you can go read!

[...] "Oh my God, did we really do it? Is that lucid, impeccably centered man really the leader of the free world?"

You can even take it a tiny step further. You can, as I recently did, glance up at the screen during Obama's congressional address and see not only a young, composed, African American president speaking to the populace in more thoughtful, articulate language than we've heard in a decade, but also note that he happens to be surrounded by a female Speaker of the House and a female Secretary of State and a smart, funny VP who, refreshingly, is not a sneering warmongering torture fanatic who enjoys sucking the blood from live baby sharks.

I mean, good Lord, what sort of astonishing snapshot is this? Two strong, powerful women and a deeply graceful black president? What country is this again?

(If, for some reason, you're also feeling a bit masochistic, you can take these moments to imagine how it might be if John McCain were the president right now, and Sarah Palin was right there next to him, grinning and winking like a truck-stop Barbie, and just how violently unstable and sour and doomed you would feel. Fun!)

Maybe longtime pundit David Gergen said it best when he noted that Obama's agenda is more than merely a stack of dramatic, expensive proposals. It's actually more akin to FDR's New Deal rolled into Lyndon Johnson's Great Society; the grand sum of what Obama is attempting to do just so happens to be "the greatest political drama in our lifetime."

This seems to be the bottom line, at least for now. We have, for the first time in just about forever, an enormously ambitious, confident, risk-taking president so full of grand and even borderline radical ideas they barely fit into a single generation, much less a single speech, and we have him at a time when we need, well, someone exactly like that.

I agree. Please enjoy the rest.