Clinton or Obama?

My personal support for women's college alumni and minorities in politics aside, I'd always perceived Obama as too young and inexperienced no matter how charismatic and likeable he is. Reading Roger Cohen's IHT Op Ed made me reconsider.

The fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination is increasingly portrayed as one between romantics and realists.

But a realistic view of Obama would be that he is best placed to seize and shape a new world of such possibilities. He has the youth, the global background, the ability to move people, and the demonstrated talent for reaching across lines of division, even those colored black and white. He would, as Andrew Sullivan has written, "rebrand" America. Wieseltier dismisses such rebranding. But even the papacy was rebranded in our times, by a Pole, and Poles then precipitated the fall of the Soviet empire.

A romantic view of Clinton might be that she has the guts and savvy to free herself of her husband's coterie of the world's rich and famous, with its dubious deal-making from Kazakhstan to Colombia, and ensure that a White House with a president and ex-president in it projects U.S. renewal rather than the tawdrier sides of Clintonism.