Others I respect have given up on him before now. I can see why. His backtracking on the treatment of torture (and photographs of torture), his hesitations to give up on rendition, on detentions, on military commissions, and on signing statements, are disheartening continuations of George W. Bush's heritage. But I kept hoping that he was using these concessions to buy leeway for his most important position, for the ground on which his presidential bid was predicated.

There was only one thing that brought him to the attention of the nation as a future president. It was opposition to the Iraq war. None of his serious rivals for the Democratic nomination had that credential--not Hillary Clinton, not Joseph Biden, not John Edwards. It set him apart. He put in clarion terms the truth about that war--that it was a dumb war, that it went after an enemy where he was not hiding, that it had no indigenous base of support, that it had no sensible goal and no foreseeable cutoff point.

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

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I surmise, Mr Wills's sense, his vote for Obama was betrayed, arises as much from an apprehension that Mr Obama is not a prinicipled person as from the senseless human sacrifice for which he now stands. Mr Wills possesses an extremely refined appreciation for tell-tale traits of transcendentalism in political speech. I would not argue, Mr Wills is opposed to "just war" or any war, merely that he finds Mr Obama's methods and rationale unpersuasive.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is a very interesting book. It accomplishes two tasks through a literary critque of Lincoln's dedication of the battlefield  cemetary: (i) to query the moral premises of martial law evoked by Lincoln; and (ii) to execavate patriotic myths (Aeschylus, Pericles, Plato, etc) of the polis operating in Lincoln's epitaphoi and, one could argue, American presidential rhetoric ever since.

Sponsored by either republican or democratic party. Now that America's battlefield is boundless.

[4.] Athenians differ from all others in their death because they live in a different way, with a chracteristic regimen (politeia)....

[6.] So the fallen heroes in the Kerameikos advance their nobility (eugenia) by going to school to the polis and its values (politeia). Thus, by their death, they teach others to live, making their city [cf. Raygun] a training (paideia) for the whole civilized world. [1992:56-58]

etc etc

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.