I don't have much to say about the campaigns on Super Tuesday (I may write something later this year when the dust settles; suffice it say that anyone who knows me well knows my political views), but this Obama profile is worth reading, and not for the reasons given in the adulatory headline and subhead. It may in fact erode the audacious hope that Obama's fans have projected on him -- an account of how the Audacious One cut deals with machine politicians to get his start in the dirty bowels of Illinois politics. It's no surprise that Todd Purdum backs away with the conclusions he forces his readers to draw from the first third of the article, relying instead on a rather good poem Obama wrote as a kid and glowing testimony from college friends impressed with the candidate's equanimity. I want to believe that Obama's as ruthless as the young Lincoln; we see hints in the distance between his stirring rhetoric and his bearing, without the sense that he's counting the number of times applause disrupted his speeches.

Whatever. It's way too early, and I already feel as if the candidates of both parties have been stumping since 2005, which in a sense they have (Clintons are always ready to go).