Realpolitik

Barack. People have threatened to leave the US if McCain gets in. Others are beginning, perhaps dimly, to perceive that there's a lot of froth but not a lot of beer in the Obama glass - all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. Mindless jingoism undeniably gets votes which will project the senator into the gladiatorial world of realpolitik for which, it seems, he has plenty of taste but not much experience. There is an alternative. Reject the almost inevitable, lowest common denominator of mass-simplisticism and recognise that it might actually be possible to teach a far greater proportion of the population to appreciate the real complexity of social decision-making, thus making participatory democracy a goal that is realistically worth pursuing, rather than merely paying lip-service to it. Were this to become a reality, his life expectancy in the arena might be significantly reduced.
I thought this cartoon interesting. There's more than an echo of Teflon Tony here. Oh, deary me.