Perhaps the most shocking thing is that he drops off his own dry cleaning. I figured he had staff for that.

When I watched him looking into the camera saying that Clinton would win, long after it was clear that she could not win, I winced because it was all very unhelpful to Obama (my candidate) and to the country and the quality of our discourse, which already is abysmal. That said, I was in some perverse way impressed that he could keep doing it, keep saying these things before tens of millions of people, millions of whom knew that he didn’t believe a word of it. Impressed in a very narrow way – this was not something I think is good or desirable, just hard to do.

I don’t share your cynicism, at least not your level of cynicism, about our politics and government, for one reason: while manifestly imperfect, this country is infinitely perfectible, and is based on a constitution that actively provides for that “perfection” as a verb, a continuing process that never quite gets to its end, but (so far) has never irretrievably extinguished the hope of progress in that direction. It’s a process that has ups and downs. I feel like we potentially are finishing one of the major downs and perhaps entering (next January) what might be at least a minor up.

I certainly have the experience of a cynic, but I try, with limited success, to have the discipline of a idealist without illusions. Have been trying to figure this out since about 1972. Still working on it.