A post on DaSilva's personal blog detailing a recent staff meeting at the Tampa Tribune announcing - again - lay-offs was the talk of the web this slow news weekend mostly because of the reactions DaSilva got from her colleagues. They offer an insightful look at how the mostly male news establishment goes about silencing enthusiasm and optimism.

"Wow, you really are young and naive, aren't you?" "Jamie" writes on DaSilva's site. "Someone sent me the link to your blog, and I almost had to laugh, it was so ridiculous. I'm truly amazed that in one of your other posts, you can tell reporters to stop whining and do something about their situation. What, praytell, young lady, would you like them to do? Let's say you were at the Trib for 10 years and had a family to support; what would you do if you were laid off? (By the way, it's laid off, not layed off. If you can read this, thank a copy editor.)" Jamie - who doesn't submit his last name - finishes with a flourish: "Unfortunately, I would say that if most of the Trib staff (or any other newspaper's staff, for that matter) reads some of your posts, you will make some serious enemies. That's something you don't want to do in this business; it's WAY too small, and with the climate as it is now, you don't want people against you. Give that some serious thought."

And this post wasn't a one-time event. Jamie repeats his threats in another comment. He - or perhaps "Jamie" is a she, the charge of sexism still stands - has a fellow-traveler in "Michael": "I'm an editor at a medium-sized paper and I'm sending your name around to everyone I know in the business to make sure that you are never hired anywhere."

Why is this an example of sexism? There's the use of the "praytell young lady" for starters. Then, there's the assumption that DaSilva doesn't have - and won't expect to have - a family to support. It would be nice if DaSilva's case were isolated. But every woman in every newsroom knows it's not; this is just a case of the threat made overt. And it's why there's precious little opinion writing by women.

Which brings us to one of the few doing the job, Maureen Dowd, and comments made by New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt. Hoyt's since retracted any sort of intention that he meant to tell Dowd to "tone it down." But that's exactly what he was doing. But he then fell for one of the oldest dodges on the planet practiced by a woman well-versed in the sort of nonsense that came DaSilva's way.

When she started covered politics there was a lot of "how dare she?" around Dowd's writing and what was described by the male political press corps as her "feminine" style of reporting. These days, she placates that crowd, indulging in cheap shots that meld pop culture and paperback psychology in columns that read like nonsense to you and me by play well with the working political press corps who are in on all the inside jokes.

And she gets away with it. Why? Because, as Hoyt notes somewhat ruefully as he fell for her line, Dowd's got a good defense: she's a girl she can't - as someone suggested in regard to "Jamie" be sexist. She - or perhaps they - can say these things the boys can only think. And no one can lay a hand on them - they're girls talking about girls. It's a particularly cynical ploy on Dowd's part but it's masterfully executed.

But it's hollow. When Dowd uses female gender images to talk about male candidates - as she does with Obama and did with Al Gore - she's associating them with weakness. And just because no one's complained - as she told Hoyt - doesn't mean it's not sexist. It is. That's not playing with gender stereotyping, as Dowd maintains, it's playing into gender stereotyping. Hoyt's failure to think through his critique - from all sides - does as well. He treats Dowd with kid gloves and fails to examine one of her great failings as a columnist.

So you can see why it's hard to know what will become of Jessica DaSilva, a young and clearly ambitious women. Perhaps, in 10 years or so, we'll be able to read her observations about Chelsea Clinton's presidential campaign and we'll get insight, not cringe-inducing snipes about Daddy's girlfriends and Mommy's ambition that parade as the "woman's" voice on politics. Maybe.

But maybe DaSilva will, instead, end up working for Michael and Jaime's associates and this is the last we'll hear of her clear, smart voice. Maybe she'll figure if she has to spend half her time placating the boys on the bus just to have a little peace in the newsroom, she'll quit or - despite her inclinations - content herself with soft features, not breaking news and strong opinion.

So next time you wonder why there aren't any women writing opinion journalism or op-eds, consider Dowd and DaSilva and the obstructions - self-made and otherwise - that lie in front of both.

I might have even voted for her.

But Clinton and her campaign spent their time trying to play by rules set down by the men who run television news. And like most big American businesses, television has a basic precept when it comes to women: No matter what, do not complain about sexism because complaining about sexism means you're a whiner who hates men. Whining is unattractive and hating men, well, that's just dumb.

Clinton did the old "personal note" dodge (code for "I know this might make you uncomfortable....") but her speech finally gave an authorative voice to what pretty much every woman working in and around politics knows: It's a boy's game. "I am a woman and like millions of women I know there are barriers and biases out there - often unconscious," she said.

Ya think?

Now, let's be clear, Clinton lost not because of sexism. She lost for many reasons, among them her husband's mouthy showboating, her tin ear for racial politics, her lousy get-out-the-vote efforts and, above all, her failure to understand that this really was not the year when a female candidate could build a lawyerly case for her moving back into the White House.

There was and is a need for dramatic change in American politics today. And the Clintons missed it.

They missed in large part because they played a 1992 game and 1992 politics was dominated by television and other mass media outlets who have long barred women from talking about politics. In that environment, the dirty tricks and sex role stereotyping that the Clintons employed to discredit women like Gennifer Flowers worked effectively because they played to the sexism of those covering politics. But that day is fading away. And one of the frustrations that many women had about Hillary Clinton was her inability to see that sexual freedoms and feminism are fused in the minds of many young women.

That's not a change that's been reflected in the national conversation about politics, however.

Women working on-line have long been aware of this disconnect and frustrated by its effects. For the most part, "blogger" means "young white man"; they've been able to dominate political talk on-line because their popularity is supported and encouraged by Big Media producers, op-ed page editors and the political establishment. Meanwhile, we girls get Glam and "MommyBlogging" and Shine where the bad news is about calories and sexually transmitted diseases, not about economic discrimination against women or the lousy state of prenatal health care for most mothers.

In the past few months, the conversation about who - and how - political discourse is conducted in this country has moved past the "oh, interesting" stage and moved on to something more substantive. Just last month, the Washington Post's omsbudsperson Deborah Howell noticed - gasp! - that her newspaper's editorial pages are dominated by older white men. The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof followed up with a blog post on the subject that's generated more than 500 comments - five times more than anything else he's done recently.

Right now, it's just talk. Progress is going to be slow and painful. Take a look at MSNBC's self-styled "liberal" Countdown's lineup of "friends" and you'll find two women, one of whom is charged with "covering" American Idol. This, of course, is cousin to the network that the Clintons - with reason - singled out for Chris Matthew's inane questions and observations. (An aside: If Chris Matthews were a woman would she be on TV? With that hair?) CNN's no better and you really don't want to rehash Katie Couric's status at CBS, do you? Me neither.

In issuing her "personal note" on the frustrations of being a working woman in American, Clinton has given voice - finally - to an enormous amount of frustration and outrage. She has, one can hope, set the stage for women to note the presence of discrimination in their workplace and in their profession. She has, one can hope, made it acceptable to ask men - and women, while we're on the subject - to stop being satisfied with one voice representing the various points of view held by women in America today and to look past gender when hiring and recruiting. And she's done so with a new tone - and 18 million people behind her.

Clinton's most fervent supporters are and were right when they note that sexism is an acceptable part of our culture. But their comments about the patriarchy are dated notions of what constitutes acceptable behavior today. They are strident, they do whine and many, many of them do hate men. It keeps them from seeing the gains that have been made.

Clinton did a nice job of sending that sort of rhetoric on its way to the dust bin of history Saturday. Too bad it's too late to put her in the White House.

The keystone of this aggrieved campaign style is the idea that virtue should triumph and that all who stand in its way are somehow morally bankrupt or worse. Here in San Francisco, when Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez ran against San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, his campaign boiled down to one idea: Progressives like me are good, everyone else is bad. You're good, you should vote for me.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? On the national stage, oddly enough, it's not the long-suffering Progressives who are ratcheting up the volume. It's the more conservative, corporate wing of the party, led by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The theater that passed for public debate over the weekend when the Democratic National Committee met to split its primary baby and allow convention delegates from the rogue states of Michigan and Florida a half-vote each in Denver was familiar to observers of San Francisco politics.

There's the self-justifying: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has served her country well - she deserves to be president! There was the self-pity: As a female candidate, Clinton's had to face more scrutiny than Obama! And there were the scare tactics: Clinton, rather than Obama, can beat McCain. Oh, and let's not forget the wallowing as Clinton supporters rolled their eyes and murmured little asides like, "I wonder what democracy looks like," in reference to the DNC's decision. It was all articulated - for better or worse - by the card-carrying protestors, the booing and shouting that punctuated Saturday's meeting.

What's really galling - and gall is a key element in this sort of politics - is that Hillary Clinton is trying to position herself as the candidate of "the people." She can say this because she's won more popular votes than her rival Sen. Barack Obama and because she may continue - using her campaign's odd math (caucuses aren't counted, ballots cast are) - to do so. This is a ham-handed way to position Clinton as the Al Gore of this contest - the person who will get screwed by crooked back-room tactics.

But Hillary Clinton isn't a woman of the people by any stretch of the imagination. Her husband, the poor boy born in Hope, Ark., who realized the American dream and rose to become president through hard-work, intelligence and and no shortage of political chicanery, used to be "the people's" representative. Sen. Clinton, born in a respectable Chicago suburb, once a Barry Goldwater supporter, a graduate of Wellesley and Yale, has the populist touch of, well, of a moderate Republican.

The real issue here isn't that Hillary Clinton is being treated badly because she's a woman. To paraphrase Geraldine Ferraro: If Hillary Clinton were a white man running the campaign she's run, he'd have been drummed out of this contest back in March. Clinton's gender is keeping her in the race, not pushing her out.

The Clintons have simply run a lousy campaign. It would have been a perfectly fine effort in 1992. Today it falls short because it's a corporate-driven 90's-style effort to out-spend and out-spin its rivals. Obama's more embracing style is working much better. And voters are responding.

Those are the mechanics. The Clinton campaign falls short for other, more traditional reasons: the screw-ups by the two candidates involved. Sen. Clinton started her campaign against Obama by dissing the Rev. Martin Luther King. Her husband followed up, equating Obama's efforts with that of the corrupt and almost universally distrusted Jesse Jackson. She's ending it by reminding folks that presidential candidates are sometimes assassinated and asserting her popularity among uneducated white folks who aren't going to vote for a black president. He's offered to talk her into taking the vice presidency, a trial balloon that only brought - out into the open - the question of what he'll be doing once the family's back in Washington.

In the end, it's hard to avoid a second conclusion, one that undercuts pretty much every statement Clinton's made about her historic run for the White House. This isn't about her. It's about them. If Obama becomes the nominee - with the money-making machinery he's built, with his support among black voters, with his grace and, oh yeah, the support of the Kennedy family - it's Bill Clinton, not his wife, who's the loser. He will no longer be the Big Dog of the Democratic Party. He'll be another ex-president. Just like Jimmy Carter.

And that undercuts pretty much every other assertion the Clintons are attempting to make. Because if it were really all about her, we wouldn't be talking to - or about - him.

Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson was right when he noted on Monday that the reforms he or anyone else envisions will take years to enact. But, don't worry, there will be legislation. Anyone who thinks that investment banks, hedge funds and their cousins, private equity firms are going to somehow escape federal government scrutiny is flat wrong. Their time has come. Again.

The preferred vehicle for savings in the U.S. moved from the nice little bank down the street to the brokerage outlet on the corner about 20 years ago. And for the past 10, it's been pretty clear to anyone who looked closely that rules about how those stock-based outfits ran their business were long over-due. The problem is that no one noticed until things went really bad. Twice.

Here in California, we got a front row seat to all this with the Internet stock bubble. The press releases said it was a period of enormous innovation during which fabulously intelligent people took massive risks with new technology and were reward in keeping with the size of that risk. That's one way to look at the five years that minted billionaires like, well, Countrywide used to write $1 million mortgages to folks with shaky credit: By the minute.

Here's another view: The late 1990s were a time when the investment portfolios of large institutions - colleges and universities, for instance, pension funds and charities - expanded in value as so-called average Americans put their savings into stocks (mostly via 401-K and other IRA-like plans) and as a result of good old supply-and-demand, stock prices rose. Richer than they'd ever been, these institutions put lots of money into venture capital funds. The venture capital funds spent like drunken sailors on an extended shore leave. As long as the stock market stayed up, they could reap the rewards of their investments at ridiculous rates of return - 20 and 30 times initial outlays wasn't uncommon.

Venture capitalist - like mortgage companies - relied on investment bankers who buy and sell stock for a living to help them reap those rewards. And like mortgage brokers, the VCs laid off some risk by selling their wares to someone else, in this case, IPO stock to the public, a price much higher than what they initially paid. As long as the market headed up, up, up - again, because folks were putting money in and buying - the i-bankers were able to aggressively selling stocks of all kinds to all kinds of buyers, some less informed than they should have been.

If all this reminds you, expect for the terms of art, of the U.S. mortgage crisis - a time where anyone could get a loan because it was assumed that the price of real estate would go up, up, up - you are not alone. Everyone understands a mortgage - loan for a house - but not so many people understand the intricate financial arrangement that make today's equity markets function. A lot of folks on Wall Street don't understand the mathematical models used to buy and sell credit (or loans) on the street just as a lot of brokers didn't understand what - exactly TheGlobe.com did even as they were hawking its wares to middle-aged school teachers with IRAs hoping to retire to Hawaii.

In both cases, those who profited the most were pretty left to oversee the quaility of the products they sold and - at the same time - look out for their customers.

During the stock bubble, the Securities and Exchange Commission made no bones about its inability to keep up with the number of filings it had to process, review and approve. As long as the appropriate statements about risk were included in the paperwork, the stock got sold. Something similar happened at the mortgage banks. As long as everyone signed a piece of paper saying they knew risk was involved - your mortgage rate could increase at any time - the loans got written. If there's a difference it's that many of those on Wall Street and in financial institutions around the world, didn't take a lot of tech companies seriously. Too bad they didn't feel that way about the bad mortgages that got written.

The end result of all this is going to be something that no one - particularly not tech investors here in California - likes to think about. Can you imagine a Netscape public offering - the company's main product was given away - sponsored by a financial institution supervised by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.? Me neither. So get ready for a more cautious and more prudent system of underwriting risk for sale in the public stock market. From now on, the growth curves for the creation, development and sale of companies - in all industries but particularly in the tech business - are going to get longer and more moderate.

So, if you're a Silicon Valley VC, the time to think about retiring is right about now. Maybe you should consider a career in politics.

Sadly, I'm not talking about Sen. Hillary Clinton's run for the White House. No, I'm talking about the New York Times, Sen. John McCain and a lobbyist you hadn't heard "boo" about until last week and the silliness with which many of those writing about politics descend to whenever they have to deal with s-e-x.

The paper has come under attack for "hinting" at an improper relationship between McCain and a very pretty blond lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. It helpfully ran her photo so we could judge - cynically, for ourselves - if she was someone we'd sleep with. The sad thing here is that if the editors at the Times weren't as willing engage in the sort of sex-role stereotyping that makes Washington the source of constant ridicule for those of us in the real world, they could have avoided this whole mess.

Here's what the Times could have said in its story:

"Aides to the Senator became concerned about his relationship with Ms. Iseman, not because they suspected he was having a sexual relationship with her but because they worried others might draw that conclusion - fairly or not - and that speculation could cripple his political ambitions. Ms. Iseman, tall and blond, with an engaging smile bears a resemblance to Cindy McCain, the Senator's wife.

"She's an attractive woman and he's a powerful Senator and you know how that's often translated," said John Weaver, the former McCain aide who says he talked with Ms. Iseman, warning her away from increasing contact with Sen. McCain.

Matter raised, matter addressed directly. Matter considered. You know, like grown-ups.

Instead, because of sensibilities of its editors or, even worse, what its editors (wrongly) think of as the delicate sensibility of its female readership, the Times had to twitter around like a bunch of high school cheerleaders, stepping all over a decent story about the role that lobbyist have played in the political career of a man who has sworn to opposed "special interests". Ya gotta wonder if any of those guys have ever been to a college mixer. And then you gotta wonder: Just how dumb do they think we women are when it comes to men, politics, power and sex?

The issue, of course, isn't that McCain was having an affair with a pretty blonde lobbyist (for the record, he probably did). The issue the larger story attempted to address is actually an interesting one having to do with the role that money and lobbyists - which go together like chocolate and peanut butter - play in American politics. McCain, as the story does a wonderful job of describing, may be the sworn enemy of lobbyists but, like pretty much anyone in the U.S. Senate, he can't really defend that position as well as he'd like us to think.

And the Times has in its story muddied the water in McCain favor. The story is now about the story of allegations of hanky-panky, not the ways in which McCain may have let his actions contradict his rhetoric. No wonder the Republicans ares having a field day: This is a fight they know how to win. My God! My God! There's VIRTUE at stake!!!!

So who do we blame for this nonsense? Well, it pains me to say it but we gotta blame the feminist prudes who clutter up America's conversation about gender. You, Maureen Dowd, I'm talking to you (again!). You, too, Caitlin Flanagan and, of course just this month The Atlantic Monthly found us a new wet-blanket for girlie fun Lori Gottlieb, who wants us to all marry, pronto. The prudes want to be wanted for their brains, not their looks, even if that's an impossible ideal that, honestly given their unrealistic ideas of what constitutes male companionship, can never be achieved. So we must all tread gently whenever we near their desks. You never know what can set a girl off.....

The problem isn't Sen. McCain and Vicki - with an "i"! - Iseman, it's that there are no women's voices raised consistently in the conversations we have about American politics. And when we do have these conversations, we retreat into some odd version of high school where people are concerned that the "wrong" kind of underwear brands you a slut, where blondes really do have more fun (or claim to) and where nonsense, not clear thinking and direct talk, replaces dialog and conversation.

Clinton's rush to Florida to stand in front of a rally clearly orchestrated to display a crowd of happy Democrats for the television news cameras is old school politics of the highest order. There's the happy candidate, the enthusiastic crowd and the flat-out coded pandering.

In other words, politics as we know it: scripted, televised, aimed mostly at press perceptions and inside baseball.

Still, there was a lot going on in that Davie, Fla. gathering. So let's break it down.

But what was really interesting was Clinton's promise to see that Florida's Democratic ballot counted at the convention in Denver. That's not what the party has decided. In fact, Florida's being punished - like Michigan - for moving its primary up early. So why was she making that promise and making it so publicly?

Fear.

Clinton's rival, Sen. Barack Obama, didn't just win South Carolina. He won South Carolina with a healthy margin. He drew black voters and he got lots of support from women. Even better, Bill Clinton's attempts to turn back the clock to the mid-1980s and bait white voters with not-so-subtle references to the much-despised Rev. Jesse Jackson were solidly rebuffed.

Two days later, Obama turned and said that he thought drivers' licenses should and could be given to the 7 million or so "illegal aliens" residing in this country. His campaign followed up on that with an endorsement from Sen. Ted Kennedy and one from Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.

The drivers' license question is the one that Clinton bollixed up Philadelphia and it means a lot - it's a formal piece of identification that lets you open a bank account, insure a car, get on a plane - to those folks who have been in this country with out proper credentials. And it wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear that news was receiving big, big play on Spanish language news outlets and radio stations.

Which means Barack Obama might do a whole lot better in California that the polls currently show.

The Caroline Kennedy endorsement is coming from someone who should be Hillary Clinton's natural constituent, a wealthy, well-educated women supporting the idea of a woman in the White House. Those women aren't supporting Clinton, however. In addition Schlossberg's endorsement comes with the tactic understanding that, were things a bit different, she might be standing next to her late brother who, it was once rumored, wanted to be a New York Senator, following in his uncle Bobby's footsteps.

The whole thing is a straight off slap in the face to the Clintons.

So is Ted Kennedy's endorsement. Having the party's senior statesmen offer support is cover - think large, shady oak, hot summer day - for any elected Democrat in the country to break party ranks and support Obama. This is very important for the so-called "super delegates" - elected officials within the party who have for reasons too numerous, too valid and too complicated to outline here - a series of beefs, large and small with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Which means that Barack Obama is going to start picking up endorsements from politicians who can help him with on-the-ground campaign logistics.

The bigger problem with Clinton's Florida appearance, however, is how mechanical it feels. Swooping in to claim a half-hearted victory that, when you get down to it, wasn't much more than a name recognition contest so the television cameras can show you with a win? The problem is that whole idea is so transparently obvious that, well, it looks half-contrived, half-silly. No one's fooled.

Which is why Obama might be picking up points with real voters. As the Washington Post's main press scold Howie Kurtz observed yesterday, Obama doesn't much care about what the press thinks. Contrast that to former President Bill Clinton's oft-recording diatribes about how the press is kowtowing to Obama.

All of this means Democrats should brace for a big fight if Clinton decides - if she hasn't already - to get the convention's rule-makers to let her count the delegates she won in Florida and Michigan to claim the nomination. That's the kind of backroom battle at which Bill Clinton excels and that may mean, in the end, that the Democrats support his wife.

Because when it comes to dealing with Bill and Hillary you can never be too cynical. And that's the real problem with the Clinton's campaign.

These days, the former first lady and her husband are doing a bang-up job of reminding me - since I'm old enough to remember - how annoyingly imperious the two of them are when someone stands in their way. Only these days, the craven campaigning isn't being played out against a reasonably peaceful background of domestic policy issues. It's a campaign for a job that really matters at a time when the stakes have not been higher, national and internationally.

In its campaign to regain the White House the Clinton family in the full-on version of its semi-permanent campaign mode is anxious to blame any and every Republican in sight - even one they've had to bring back from the dead - for the problems this country has right now.

The problem with this strategy is that Bill Clinton was not a great president. He was a perfectly capable leader. He remains a stunningly gifted politician. But his eight years in Washington weren''t exactly breathtaking. And seeds of some of what's so very wrong today were planted and took root in those eight years.

Let's take the crisis one melt-down at a time. We have a war in the Middle East that's created a constant state of crisis moving from one slightly stable nation - Lebanon - to another - Pakistan. Hillary Clinton voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Why? Because, like her husband, notes Christopher Hitchens, she believed that a confrontation with the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussien was "inevitable." And, like President Bush, she thought that the U.S. power to hold sway in the region would remain unquestioned.

Other Clinton habits - a faith in free markets usually at home in the Republican party - play a role in our current mess as well. The reality is that global markets need global regulation and oversight and the U.S. inability to oversee its own house - from the tech-bubble shenanigans of the late 1990s to the mortgage free-for-all of the past few years - are rooted in a blind and naive faith in the market to police itself. That thinking - free of any serious discussion of consequences - was welcomed into the Democratic party by Bill Clinton.

That's really the issue at the heart of my renewed disenchantment with the Clinton's. They won't try anything too new and they hate to be associated with anything terribly unpopular. Hillary Clinton is a smart and thorough policy wonk. But wonks don't lead - they implement. And what's needed now is a daring kind of leadership that's focused a little less on winning re-election and a little more on innovative solutions to pressing problems.

A few years ago, those of us who opposed the U.S invasion of Iraq needed leadership, rhetoric and speechifying to oppose the administration's plans. We didn't get it. Today, what's needed now is some smart economic rhetoric that assures international markets that the U.S. has its financial house in order and that the nation's future leader understands global financial markets. Hear any?

Me neither. Instead, Clinton's offering is criticism of Barack Obama for his observation that Ronald Reagan was good at leading the country and talk about global economic task forces. Listening to her, you'd think it was 1992. She'll be saying "it's the economy, stupid" in a few minutes - watch.

The irony here is that Ronald Reagan was good at leading the country - people followed and liked him. If he were alive today he'd have managed to get off one smart quip designed to set the markets at ease. Or watching U.S. banks and corporations take investments from foreign governments he'd have stood up and demanded the same access - tear down those walls - to foreign government banks as those nations enjoy here.

Sadly that sort of thinking isn't coming from Clinton. No, she's focused on jobs - which may as Republican candidate John McCain recently suggested in Michigan - never coming back. Or she's prattling on about voting records and slumlords, hoping - and she will probably succeed - in putting Barack Obama in his place.

Obama, of course, isn't doing a whole lot better when it comes to ideas about economic policy. But here's something he has done well on the foreign policy front: Promise something that looks like hope because he's talking about new and innovative solutions to problems. And while it may not be morning in America - that famous Reagan ad that reassured American voters there were better days ahead - it sure looks better than another eight years of finger-pointing, backbiting, and bickering.

On the surface, Clinton's inability to get traction with a wide swath of professional women is something of a contradiction. The assumption as you connect the dots across the magazine cover stories and front-page profiles is that "feminists" and "professional" women are the same crowd with the same interests: women who want to see another woman in the White House.

There are plenty of women with high-powered jobs who are happy to call themselves "feminists" and who are supporting Clinton's candidacy. But there are just as many - the more calculating perhaps, the more moderate, maybe - who understand that in many circles "feminist" is code for "lesbian". Or they're women - and they are legion in partners' meetings and board rooms - who believe feminism is politics and that politics has no place in business because such ideas - spoken or not - do not sit well with their male colleagues. Judging by her behavior in the Senate and on the campaign trail, Clinton in, in many respects, one of these women. One who has pulled her punches - in her love life and her professional life - to succeed.

Clinton's new-found ability to cover her desire to wield power with a softer touch, her somewhat stiff and stilted delivery, her get-it-done-at-all-costs failure-is-not-an-option view of the her campaign, along with that train-wreck of a marriage are all earmarks of a very brittle version of the 21st century American womanhood, one that calls for almost constant, visible, unending compromise on all fronts.

Hillary Clinton is prepared, she is ready and - partly because she's spent her life being held to a higher standard - she's about as much fun as a nun at a co-ed summer camp. And she is in many respects the woman her peers - often desperately - do not want to be, a woman many are afraid they have become. In almost every area of her life, Clinton's followed a remarkably cautious course - marriage to the politician, not entering politics, putting up with his philandering, not striking out on her own (even out of pride), cutting a moderately conservative course (on the Iraq War, on international diplomacy on health care), not bringing anything truly radical to the debates about the nation's future.

Clinton is also a woman who - correctly or not - is see to have somehow not gotten this boy-girl, husband-wife thing down. Let's face it, there are plenty of women who would happily sleep with Bill Clinton but precious few would sign up for a lifetime of on-and-off commitment. That's another sacrifice Hillary Clinton appears to have made and for lots of women (paging Maureen Dowd) this is what rankles the most.

If the tired old saying about presidents is true - Americans elect the man you want to have beer with - then there's a female corrallary and Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a woman you'd take shopping. Her husband? Hell, yes. Maybe even her daughter who clearly knows her way around upper Madison Avenue. But the Senator? Nah. And it ain't just the pantsuits. It's her sensibility. Clinton's the woman who will ask why you need another pair of black shoes, not the one who will remind you that Christian Louboutin is only on sale at Nieman's Last Call for about 10 seconds and if those things fit, you better grab 'em. Now.

Leave it to Oprah Winfrey to hammer home this contrast. Oprah - a successful career woman by any stretch of the imagination - shows up on stage at a political rally in a warm silver pantsuit, a little low-cut and a lot sexy. You may never watch her TV show but man, if you're going to be 50 any time soon, you wanna look as good as Oprah does. And you want to be as fun and as interesting, as likable as she appears to be. Not to mention the boyfriend.

That's not to say Clinton isn't likable. She is gracious, well-spoken, a good politician and, increasingly, a comfortable and savvy campaigner. But she's not standing before her peers saying she's going to make great changes in their lives or hers. She's telling us she's going to keep doing what it takes to keep going. And for some that's just not good enough anymore.

That's not a statement about the busy nature of campaigns. It's more a comment on Obama's interest in wooing an important group of voters: young, tech-savvy and pretty well disgusted by politicians ignorant of their day-to-day lives. If there were a sign that the Obama campaign is taking the California presidential primary seriously, this is it.

Now, Iet's be realistic. There is no way on God's green earth that Barack Obama himself sat down and decided that the Federal Communications Commission's definition of broadband should be up from 200 kps to something more in keeping with the traffic capacity on today's phone and cable networks (and no, netboy, the new definition will not be 1 gbps so you can get practically free BitTorrent). And the Senator from Illinois uses very careful language to talk about the much-abused and poorly understood concept of "net neutrality." In other words, this document was written by someone - not named Obama - who knows where the land mines are buried in intra-Geek wars on telecom policy.

Other interesting aspects: The absence of any comment on copyright - although the patent and trademark delays that many in the tech world moan about are addressed. Google, of course, is betting much of its business on changes in copyright law. There is some nice stuff about electronic health records and making the health care system more efficient accompanied, of course, by a nod to the privacy advocates. There's a call for protections for children but with an emphasis on parental responsibility. There's talk about immigration and Silicon Valley's precious H1-B visas but no specific numbers, there's an endorsement of innovation and intellectual property protection in science and tech but no direct talk about stem cell research.

In other words, this is a deeply political document that bears in mind the tensions that exist between two of California's largest and wealthiest interest groups, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It also weighs the Geek determinism of the open source/open government crowd against the more traditional politics of process and procedure that have long relied on paper, hearing and other "real" world events. Obama moves much of that to the web with the usual lip-service to protecting individual rights and open government. But, more importantly, anyone who understands these balancing acts is showing a shrewdness about politics that belies Obama's claims to not quite get how this Washington thing works.

And in its attention to detail, this statement does represent a subtle change in how tech plays politics and how politicians are starting to play tech. And, for a change, it's not all about the money.

When I covered telecom back in the Old County a decade ago, the Federal Communications Commission wasn't exactly a talked-about agency. Even with the passage of the 1996 Telecom Act, the thinking on the part of those who ran Congress and the White House was that phones and TV were lovely modern conveniences you could happily ignore until you needed them. Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton had better things do to with their time than try to figure out if AOL really was "the Internet" or who was running that Internet thing anyway. When it got big enough, someone would write a memo.

That changed a bit with as the Clinton administration began to look - closely - at economic policy. The enormous amount of money - and the campaign support that Clinton enjoyed from Silicon Valley - raised the profile of the area's financial players. And the glam that tech gave off in the late 1990s was part of what was clearly a mutual attraction as well. The two shared a common currency: Mutual self-interest. The valley's movers and shakers - notably John Doerr, partner in the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers - got to hang out with the leader of the free world and look cool and powerful. And the leader of the free world got easy access to one lots of deep pockets and look cool to younger voters.

That's one reason why a number of folks watching the politics of Silicon Valley in recent months have been surprised to see Obama do as well as he has. As a trial lawyer, John Edwards has no traction with people have been faced one time too many with shareholder lawsuits so he's out of business here. But surprisingly given her husband's history, Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a slam-dunk in the valley. Some of this is flat-out sexism. Silicon Valley still believes women should be seen but not heard (Elizabeth Edwards out-spokeness plays a role here as well). Hillary Clinton may be the candidate of "the wives" but she seems to be struggling for support among the men who so happily backed her husband.

Which raises an interesting question. Is Bill Clinton power to raise money and generate attention with this group, in fact, fading? In that case, Obama's policy statement is a clear throw down - the second this month - for Clinton. And, given former Vice President Al Gore's now formal affiliation with Kleiner Perkins - he became a partner this week - it seems a few brave souls have left the Clinton camp.

Obama may have started his campaign thinking he'd have to run twice for the presidency - now to prove he's not Al Sharpton, later for the win - but it seems that strategy has shifted recently. Which takes us back where we started. It's not what Obama's saying here that's important. It's that he's saying it.

But they are unique and they are defying all kinds of odds.

Obviously frustrated by the lack of coverage, or perhaps more accurately, at the coverage of his campaign as a phenomenon not worth taking seriously, Obama summoned the New York Times in for a few chats and playing the magazine off against the political staff, delivered a well-crafted smack-down to some of his less fearless rivals.

Make the one fearless rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Faced with the Clinton media manipulation machine, Obama's called her out on foreign policy. And, well, she's probably not going to answer. The Senator from New York stays on message and the message is moderate, considered and focused on pocketbook issues that will serve her well through next year.

Besides, the Clintons - based on their years of experience in U.S. politics - know that elections are not won or lost on U.S. foreign policy initiatives. Historically, Americans care very little for life beyond their borders.

Obama, who likes to point out that his sister is married to an Canadian of Asian descent and that his grandmother still lives in Kenya - does not share that view. And as Andrew Sullivan is pointing out in this month's Atlantic, Obama's life experience is more commonplace all the time. With his recent comments on how he would change the U.S. relationship with Iran, Obama is making very interesting series of bets, moving the election-year conversation to foreign affairs and the U.S. role in the world and how it should be changed while making that argument appeal to the average voter.

Getting that strategy to work however, will probably require some help from President George W. Bush and the public disgust - that's not too strong a word - with his administration.

There is growing concern that the Bush White House will invades Iran. If it does, there's a good chance that moderate Americans who did not object terribly to the Iraq invasion - the ejecting of a bad man from a corrupt regime - will vehemently protest more involved U.S conflicts and loss of life in the Middle East. Clinton's bet, and pretty much everyone else running, is that voters won't be moved - or won't be moved enough - by an extension of hostilities between America and Iran, another "bad" country run by bad men. Obama's bet is that voters will care.

If Obama's right, it's bad for "nuke 'em now" Rudy Giuliani whose advisors want to turn Tehran into a parking lot. And it's not great for Sen. John McCain who has supported Bush on the war. But it's also bad for Clinton who has moderately followed - but still followed - the Bush Administration's lead in foreign affairs. Part of this is Clinton's local politics. She's a New York Senator. To stay in office she needs to follow a peaceful pro-Israel path and the Bush Administration stands next to no other politicians in that regard.

But Obama, who opposed the war while he was still in the Illinois State House and built a presidential campaign on that, may have a very interesting edge here. If Iran is invaded - and as my Spot-on colleague Christopher Allbritton fears, the region explodes and implodes simultaneously - Obama is the only guy who's urged peace. Consistently.

The undercurrent here is also interesting. In making his suggestions about negotiating with Iran, Obama becomes the only guy in the race who has - obliquely to be sure - suggested that the U.S. in talking to Iran dramatically re-adjust its relationship with Israel and Saudi Arabia, both now content (although not strictly happy) with the odd balance of power in which they can claim a fair measure of influence because of their ability to speak with and for the U.S. Sharing power with those who would happily supplant them - or worse - doesn't make anyone in Riyadh or Jerusalem very happy.

But that may, in the end, be where we're headed anyway. A few months ago, writing in the New Yorker, the magazine's former European correspondent Adam Gopnik summed up the feeling that European heads of state had toward the U.S. It's worth quoting at length because it is this ideal - and this idea of how the West can and should work together - that Obama is moving the U.S. toward.

"...for the first time, it's possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London...When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about toublieng foreign take-overs, they talk about Gazprom. the Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkle generation is not unsympathetic to America but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac in the nineties when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it's sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from."

Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy is based very much on business-as-usual in Washington a reassurance to Americans that while we may have had some rough spots, things are back on track. That's not true. With a little luck, that growing realization, which could well be measured by his ability to shift the U.S. presidential debate to foreign policy, may well put Barack Obama in the White House.

These early primaries and caucuses are yet another another sign of how very badly everyone wants the Bush Administration to end. But the Iowa date along the expectation that the New Hampshire primary will move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday (they're taking December) means California's primary on February 5 is going to count. For real.

Right now, the tea-leaf readers say John Edwards will win Iowa. After all, he's been living there for a year. Obama will come in second and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will be a close third. In New Hampshire, say the sages, Clinton and Edwards reverse positions. Obama's idealistic followers hang with him throughout. In other words, the three Democrats will head into Feb. 5th primary needing big, big wins to seal their standing before the voters. Which means Gore's endorsement could be a big, big deal.

California is a big, big win and since the state will - barring a miracle - break for Democrats in the general election next fall it's the party to watch here. But California is also a state with big, big problems that cut across party lines and, as a result, creates the kind of political potholes that can derail a campaign.

The mortgage foreclosure crisis is just getting started here and it's going to echo through the holiday season. Kicking folks out of their houses is never pretty. Kicking them out during the holidays, even worse. This isn't hitting hard in San Francisco or the wealthy Silicon Valley suburbs but out in the towns and communities where working folks moved so they could afford a place to live it's relentless. These are also, by the way, the communities - Tracy and Gilroy - where Iraqi war casualties are hitting the hardest.

The danger here for Democrats is promising too much to too many and ignoring the realities of international credit markets to score points or offending moderates by lumping the war and the lending crisis together to blame Republicans for all that's bad.

In California, immigration isn't all about Mexicans and South Americans. Remember, we have a governor who talks funny. In Northern California, immigration is closely tied to the U.S. relations with India and China which are this area's life's blood. Forget that - and it's easy to do so since the rhetoric is all about supposedly lazy Mexicans - and you can get backed into nasty debates about out-sourcing, balance of trade and Pacific Rim economics where Democrats start to sound like union-loving protectionists or class-baiting populists.

Then there's gay rights. California's gay community is out, proud and loud and not above baiting candidates it doesn't like. We've seen a little of this, so far, but we'll see more. The gay community - rightly - wants to push the Democrats it supports toward a more open acceptance, across the party. California's a good place to do that but promising too much can be dangerous.

Health care is another landmine. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been trying to enact a package of reforms but it's been slowing going. Interestingly, California reform efforts are being led by a Republican governor who's efforts are being blocked by the Democratic state legislature.

And lastly, we have environmental issues. The fires sweeping through Southern California will be a stand-in for discussion about things green. And these days, green means Gore.

Gore's won a Nobel prize and an Academy Award making him possibly the only man in the U.S. who can talk simultaneously to California's two wealthiest - and political active - constituencies, science-minded Geeks and starry-eyed celebs.

Given the way the Democrats stand now, Gore will surely be asked to make an endorsement before - or close to - the California date and for Democrats, this will be the move to watch. In a race as tight as the party is expected to have coming into California, Gore's good word may well make a candidate. Will he overcome his well-established dislike of the Clintons and back the Senator from New York? Or is Gore, his dislike of politics-as-usual (in part because of the Clintons) ready to endorse Sen. Barack Obama? What about John Edwards a fellow-southerner who's going to suffer - mightily - as the Clinton campaign machine gears up in Iowa?

Gore's a canny enough politician to hold his cards close until he needs to show them. But former President Bill Clinton is the one party in this conversation who, back in the White House, could pretty much grant any wish Gore might have, unlike the other candidates in the race. So really, when it comes to California's primary, the question that ought to be asked is pretty simple: What's Gore going to do?

What, exactly, is 21st century "populism"?

It sure is chic. Almost everybody who calls himself a Democrat is standing up for the little guy these days. But who's a little guy? And why is it so hard to tell? Because looking at the various parts of this debate, it's tempting to say that when it comes to Democratic Party Populism we've met the enemy and, well, he's us.

The loudest voices have been the party activists at DailyKos who call themselves "progressives" but pride themselves on their populist leanings (and don't seem to know that those terms carry different meanings for students of American history) who are beating this drum hard in a search for real and lasting influence. Presidential hopeful John Edwards talks about two Americas when it comes to wages, tax policy and health care. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants us to know she's all about preserving jobs here in the U.S. - sort of - and Sen. Barack Obama is African-American so we know - just by looking at him - that he's no friend of the "the man." And all of them have backers who are millionaires over and over, courtesy of the new, global, Internet-based economy.

Certainly, there's a lot of posing here. Black politicians in Chicago, where Obama chose to settle after graduating from Harvard Law School, are hardly marginalized. John Edwards was a trial lawyer - a leader of class-action suits who made millions and, unlike a lot of his colleagues, didn't line his pocket at the expense of his clients. The crowd at Kos seem more bullying - and more concerned with their positioning as the party's virtue squad - every month. And Clinton, well, she used to live in the White House, which isn't exactly slumming.

Classic populism began with a genuinely aggrieved class: Midwestern farmers caught at the end of a century when the U.S. was moving from being an agricultural economy to an industrializing nation. Farmers and small town bankers took on the railroad, which they saw, correctly, as devaluing their goods by making them compete across the nation, and the "New York" banks whose interest rates and credit policies hurt them even more. Their hero was Williams Jennings Bryan, a wealthy and well-respected quasi-establishment figure who, living in Nebraska, was more the embodiment of small-town American virtues than the Robber Barons of Wall Street whom he so harshly criticized.

But 111 years after Bryan's most famous speech, the "Cross of Gold" plea to inflate U.S. currency to relieve the financial stress on farmers, the contradictions between fighting for the little guy, actually being the little guy and profiting from defending the little guy are deeper than ever. In Bryan's time, the fight was against the changes created as America urbanized and labor left the farms, as railroad united the nation's commerce for the first time and businesses became corporations - large entities employing hundreds of people to manufacture goods - to meet the demand of the new, nationwide market.

Today, that's being reversed in some ways and the trend toward rewarding individual efforts is increasing. The economic hero of today is the deal guy, the person who strikes out on his own and creates something. But these aren't just hard-working corporate sloggers nor are they the totally self-made men of the 19th century. They are well-educated and have the financial resources to sustain themselves through lean times. These folks are hedge fund managers and venture capitalists - partners, not employees - software and Internet entrepreneurs. Almost all of them rely on 21st century communications - this Internet thing figures prominently - to expand the power of one talented individual. And that individual is often richly rewarded.

New York and California offer great looks at the dilemmas to come here. Take a look at the line Sen. Charles Schumer, a hard-working fund-raiser and long-time friend of Wall Street, has to walk, as his party debates measure to raise taxes on hedge funds and other partnerships. Schumer's problem is that many of those independent entrepreneurs, VCs and self-made men believe themselves to be "little" guys who just happen to have done well and just happen to have been rewarded by "the market." Their faith in their own efforts - as individual business people working outside the corporate system taking risks, often quite substantial risks - is as much a "fight the man" philosophy as anything else. Want to see an illustration of this in the hands of a master? Listen to Leo Hindrey compare himself and his career as a deal guy with Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. Or check out Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs, probably our first self-styled counter-culture billionaire who's made millions off iPods, iPhones and iMacs manufactured in Asia.

I have long called this group "Progressive libertarians" - for their belief in their ability to improve the world and their love of market-based "reality" - but as I watch this presidential campaign I can't help but think about the stresses being put on the Demcratic Party by these very wealthy and very demanding donors. Something's gonna give. And it may well be some solid assumptions about protecting that mythical little guy.

These folks are not self-made in the ways of their parents and grandparents. Most are the children of the post-World War II American middle class, people who could send their children to good and inexpensive state schools (Edwards went to NC State and UNC) or even better private schools (Clinton to Wellesley and Yale, Obama to Havard). These families had health insurance provided by their employers, most could count on pension funds to help with their retirement. In short, the mechanics to improve their ways of life were solidly in place. Think Jobs - like Hindrey, a deep-pocketed Democrat - is going to be interested in seeing Democrats make it harder to make computers in China?

The idea that America's wealthy will reach out to provide the benefits they enjoyed to those who don't have them anymore seems unlikely. The health care debate feels centered on what aging boomers need to be comfortable in old age. The education controversies are over loans, not the fact that many colleges (despite endowments, federal government support and tax-free status) are too expensive for most to attend or too poorly funded and supplied to offer a real education to anyone. The immigration debate neatly and repeatedly avoided any conversations about global economics and the need - around the world - for a mobile workforce. Tax policy centers on whether rates should be increased for billionaire hedge fund managers, not on the fact that these partnerships usually set their own tax rates by varying the ways, timing and characterization of compensation and using that to their advantage.

In other words, some of the very stuff that might hurt the self-made "little guys" of the new Internet class isn't being discussed. And you have to wonder if that's not because "populism" has been co-opted by the very folks it was meant to confront: the well-off who control our economic destiny. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that all this posturing is little more than an attempt to hark back to a day when going after big corporations really was radical. And it's hard to avoid the worry that the folks the party should be serving - the struggling, the truly poor, the uninsured, the newly arrived - aren't going to get anything like real assistance anytime soon.

So what happens in the next 18 months, the real dawn of this new era, will set practices that determine how campaigns raise and spend money in the years to come. Too bad it won't be the good behavior we remember. Why? Well, the on-line world is prime for a big juicy campaign finance scandal and Monday's Supreme Court ruling loosening the restrictions on campaign ads just nudged that process along.

The ingredients are all at hand: tons of money, out-sized expectations, very little oversight and blatant opportunism. And it's the Democrats who are going to get hurt this time. Why? Well, they're the party that keeps trying to keep money out of politics. And some of the biggest mouths in the self-styled "blogosphere" - the ones who aren't afraid to advertise the link between their affiliations and their bank accounts - are Democrats.

They are taking advantage of an interesting state of affairs. As long as concerned "individuals" are writing the checks to fund on-line activity and as long as bloggers and their backers convince themselves that the new on-line political world is made up of amateurs and concerned citizens, it's pretty much a free-for-all. There are no disclaimers required on-line ("Paid for by ..."), there are no spending caps, no need to tell the Federal Elections Commission who you are or exactly what you're doing as long as you maintain "plausible deniability" and act alone.

Bloggers like to think of themselves as concerned individuals, all working independently for a common goal. That's a nice bit of self-styling and it may have been true four years ago, for about 10 minutes, until a political consultant named Joe Trippi figured out what it meant to have an on-line guy on staff. Today, the "blogosphere" is not a concerned cadre of amateur writers and analysts, particularly when it comes to politics. It is a network of political operatives, analysts and organizers who work together - on both sides of the party divide - to spread their message. Some are paid by the campaigns, some are not. Some really are volunteers but the big sites - the ones that charge almost $10,000 a week for their ads - are political businesses. And it's time to stop pretending otherwise.

During the past two elections cycles, on-line activism has become organized, calculated and well-crafted; its messages and goals are integrated into overall campaign strategy and efforts and messaging are coordinated. Pretty much every Democratic or Progressive blogger, for instance, can log-on to Townhouse, a private and exclusive - no detractors allowed! - site that alerts the party faithful to that day's message. Ironically, a number of those most active on Townhouse - specifically Markos Moulitsas, founder of the very popular DailyKos - spend a great deal of time decrying the Republican party's hold on financing and conservatives' hold on political messaging. It's a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The rise of bloggers' political power is strictly the result of their potential for unregulated, unsupervised, on-line mischief made possible by the Federal Election Commission's decision to cover almost all on-line writing with a get-out-of-jail-free card, otherwise known as the "media exemption." An "independent" blogger is not considered a political entity subject to regulation by the commission, and therefore does not have to report spending, income or other financial details. This ruling has had a straightforward effect: It turned blog advertising into "walking around money" - the 21st century equivalent of the payments, coerced or otherwise, political campaigns make to powerful on-line community organizers.

This is no exaggeration. Look at the outrage that erupted when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign made ad buys on sites not in sympathy to her views or those of other Democrats; she was asked to make it up to those she snubbed.

"Clinton Web Chat: Where's My Ad?" asked radio talk show host Taylor Marsh who went on to "remind" Sen. Clinton that "blogs are small businesses, too." She continued: "…It's not like her team doesn't know I exist. I find it a little annoying that Clinton's team thinks that people like me don't merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don't reach the one-hundred thousand mark. It's a very telling strategic move that I find very disrespectful of small business owners who need the advertisement." Marsh, a clever girl, went on to say that she's supporting John Edwards because he supports her - he's bought ads on her site.

This is a great example of why on-line has become the new home of the dirty trick. Its leaders are for sale. And they see absolutely nothing wrong in advertising that fact. Which will only mean more trouble on the way. Opinion that's changed by payment is opinion that can be easily changed.

Now add two things that are only starting to catch on: video clips and affinity or social networking sites.

Remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? It wasn't a rag-tag bunch of ex-vets; it was a well-organized, well-funded campaign to discredit Sen. John Kerry. Now, imagine the Swift Boat vet's allegations each turned into a separate 30-second on-line video, released anonymously and posted on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook with "episodes" strung out over a week or a month, publicized, reposted and excerpted by bloggers and you begin to get the idea. It will almost certainly happen. Why? Because it can. There's nothing - absolutely nothing in the law today - to stop a well-heeled millionaire, a union sympathizer, a group of "concerned citizens" with a deep hatred for a particular candidate or cause from funding a series of negative or libelous YouTube videos.

And the line between what's on-line and what's in the "real" world is getting more porous all the time. The anti-Hillary parody of the "1984" Apple Inc. advertisement done by a Sen. Barack Obama supporter was a taste of where we're going. The 1984 parody was a hit on the web - sort of. But its real accomplishment was straddling the line between news and advocacy and getting TV time. The news value of the spot increased its impact and spread a well-targeted message about Clinton, one that, in another glimpse of things to come was crafted - supposedly - by a concerned individual working alone, outside the supervision of the political campaign that retained his consulting firm. (If this guy had been a Republican would anyone have believed that? Just asking.) Which, of course, is exactly why the Clinton campaign has decided to seed YouTube with ads by the former president endorsing his wife's candidacy and other pro-Hillary video shorts. It's an Internet polio vaccine that also, by the way, makes news.

In another ironic twist, the social networks where these sort of videos can quickly spread are encouraging political activity on-line. But they haven't followed up on that ideal with anything that resembles practical thinking: editorial oversight or even policies on the timing of political ads and messaging. Again, the belief that the concerned individual should be allowed to speak has triumphed over the more cynical expectation - mine and that of many working in this election cycle - that political interests and campaign strategist can bend that idealism to their own ends.

And once there's one really dirty trick campaign there will be several and once there are several, there will be cries for reform. The end will take us right back where we started with the Democrats and Republicans who fought so hard to make the government keep its hands off the Internet's noble citizens begging for some oversight and disclosure of how money flows on-line. And they'll get it. Finally. So when it's too late - after the money's been spent, the names called, the mud slung - we'll be back where we started when the Internet was young: thinking all politics is dirty, run by opportunists and con artists. Only from now on we'll be calling those folks "bloggers."

That's right, the American Left - tree-hugging, Volvo-driving, ACLU-supporting, sushi-eating atheists, academics and quasi-Marxists - has become as patriotic as, well, as the America-first crowd with its flag-waving, Sousa-humming love of apple pie, Sunday school and football. The best example is the way in which the men and women serving in Iraq are being treated. A Yale-educated cartoonist who began his career lampooning the Vietnam War has become one of the most eloquent chroniclers of the Iraq war. Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury - from the injury suffered by B.D. to its annual roll-call of the dead on Memorial Day - is a regular and heartfelt tribute to national service.

Certainly some of this is due to the all-volunteer army; the U.S. armed forces work on an economic draft - many of those who serve are those who needed the extra money from reserve duty - so the sacrifice is even more painful for everyone to witness. Certainly, we've come a long way since Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched. Take a look at a now-quaint essay, "Capture the Flag", that Democratic political consultant Dan Carol published just after the funeral of President Ronald Reagan. Among its recommendations: Democrats should demonstrate their love of country by flying the stars and stripes. "This is a patriotic country and it's part of the game and we need to fight for our flag when right wingers are trying to hijack it for their purposes," Carol wrote.

Today, Carol's sentiments sound dated, don't they? With a few exceptions - okay, Noam Chomsky and his last dinner party - the American Left is increasingly patriotic; love of country isn't something no one talks about anymore. The best example of this shift is highlighted in Jonathan Feedland's essay in The New York Review of Books assessing three recent books, all critical of U.S. foreign policy. Freedland cites Chalmers Johnson in particular:

Johnson enters this discussion from an angle different from that of Noam Chomsky and the traditional anti-imperialist left... his is a patriot's passion: his motive is to save the American republic he loves. While Chomsky argues that American guilt can be traced back to the Constitution - he disapprovingly quotes James Madison's insistence that the new Republic should "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority"...Johnson reveres that document and the careful balance of powers it constructed.

Well, we're coming to the end of empire - which is the real point of Freelander's essay - and while many on the Left are perfectly happy to keep decrying the U.S.' abuse of its economic and militarily superpowers, they also seem to be getting a sense of just how threatened that status has become. The quiet realization that economic status lost on the world stage can not be easily recouped seems to be motivating some interesting new displays of patriotism.

That acknowlegement, tacit or open, is going to create a lot of intellectual discomfort. If the Left's new-found patriotism is motivated, as Freeland suggests, by the hope that the U.S. will finally abandon its long-standing imperialist policy and step down from its exploitation of other countries, economically and militarily, they may get their wish sooner than they'd like. And the economic consequences of that reduction aren't all that attractive to contemplate because you can't call the tune - as a Liberal or a Conservative, a human rights activist or a real politik advocate - if you can't pay the piper.

The questions aren't going to be easy, either. That same imperialism - exercised mostly by U.S.-owned multinational corporations - has all of us living in a style, compared to the rest of the world, to which we've become fabulously accustomed. It provides the U.S. with cheap labor and lots of lovely goods. It's made us - all of us - rich. But economic power is starting to shift, mostly to Asia. Why else are the Chinese able to take a $3 billion stake in a private equity firm? How do you think a corporation based in Dubai was able to take over management of U.S. ports? And why do you think Indian billionaires are buying up European and American companies the way Americans used to snap up trinkets in Mexican flea markets?

That no one really notices these shifts - except maybe CNN's Lou Dobbs who seems intent on blaming the nation's problems on illegal immigration and nothing more - is itself an interesting state. An understanding of the real economic forces that drive this most capitalistic of nations and have made it prosper has always been something that politicians in both parties have firmly grasped; that's why, for all the rhetoric, real socialism has never caught on here. That's doesn't seem to be the case any longer and that absence doesn't bode well, regardless of your political leanings. But it's also hard to escape the suspicion that most of the Left - not just the hard left but the soft Democratic party center - want to keep these issues at bay because they have no real answers.

As for the Republicans, it's tempting to think that they're saber-rattling as compensation: They realize the U.S.'s international economic dominance is increasingly fragile so they're cowing everyone with noise and bluster. But in our friend Alice's world, there's a different kind of logic we could apply, one as maddening as that of the Red Queen. Are they screwing up on purpose to demonstrate that this is how it's going to be whenever America appears on the world stage? Are they just preparing Americans for a day when whatever is said by this country's leaders won't matter a whit to the Chinese, French, Asians or Saudis because our power to hold economic sway is reduced? With its continually failing foreign policy, is George Bush's White House telegraphing a simple message: We're going to hell in a hand basket and there's not a whole lot we can do about it?

That's not to say there's nothing to worry about in the short term. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is stonewalling Congress; not exactly a new strategy for this administration, so determined to reclaim what it thinks of as the halcyon pre-Nixonian era of the imperial executive. But still, foolhardy. Gonzales has been less than honest about what - if anything - he knew about the firing of eight prosecutors. And he's being dumb about who he's misleading.

The folks working for him don't seem too sharp either. Telling U.S. attorneys - not a modest bunch of men or women - that they're being canned because of poor performance is a bit like tugging on Superman's cape. You're gonna get smacked and it's gonna hurt. I mean, look, they're not just lawyers - they're prosecutors.

The job is a high-profile law enforcement job and it is a political job. That's not to say that the offices are staffed by hacks. But the people who occupy those jobs are political animals. Want a life-imitates-art-imitating-life example? Consider former Sen. Fred Thompson and his current day job on the wildly popular Law & Order. He's a prosecutor; he runs the office that decides who gets tried, who doesn't and why. And, while he's holding a state office on TV, that fictional job is manifestly political. Why? Do you think it's because, in real life, Thompson, himself a former assistant U.S. attorney, Watergate Committee staffer and oh, yeah, former U.S. senator, is thinking of running for the presidency?

It ain't no different across the real live Foley Square in New York City where the show is set. You need look no further than the actions taken by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald - the guy who took former White House Aide Scooter Libby to trial for perjury - to get a sense of this. Still not convinced? Go back a few years and look at the career of an ambitious Italian-American named Rudolph Guiliani who first made a name for himself as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. First he and his band of ambitious prosecutors went after Wall Street insiders - including Michael Milken. Then they went after organized crime. Next thing you know, Rudy's mayor of New York.

So the idea that Alberto Gonzalez is some how "politicizing" the U.S. attorneys' office is, well, not exactly the huge and appalling shock that many Democrats would like to have us believe. High-profile prosecutions - which is what makes the office and often the man in the office - aren't done in a vacuum. And everyone in politics knows it.

Now, don't get me wrong. The degree to which the Bush administration's efforts monkey with the U.S. attorney's office was ham-handed. The whole thing was clearly coordinated, not by the party, working through the states (which is the normal course of events), but by the White House working through the Department of Justice and, in particular, through Monica Goodling, a young woman who might, as they say, have had the sense God gave her but clearly has the political skills of a school girl. This stuff makes for great political theater and - the ethics aside - the Democrats are right to take the Bush administration to task.

But there's something larger here that feels like it's getting overlooked: the overall politicization of the judiciary - not just the prosecutors but the judges and justices who interpret the law. And it's interesting that very few Democrats are talking about that. Which is yet another reason why "none of the above" - also known as "independent" - is the fastest growing political party out there.

For a while, it looked like the U.S. attorney firings might stand in for a larger question about the not-so-subtle influence that politics is having on all kinds of judicial appointments. Plenty of folks on the federal benches - most notably former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner - have been saying that they are disturbed by the increasing pressure being put on those who decide the meaning of the law. Joining that chorus might not be such a bad idea if, say, you wanted to be president.

But no. The problem is that Democrats are just as willing as Republicans to politicize the judiciary. Abortion is the code word here and you'll hear that again and again in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's talks before female voters. You'll start hearing it from conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback and, eventually, Sen. John McCain. That's not to say it's unimportant. It's just - as I wrote last year - not always the most important aspect of a judicial confirmation.

So, chances aren't good that you won't hear anyone running for president talk about taking politics out of the judicial process unless they mean "taking politics we don't like" out of the judicial process. This small fight - the one over the attorney general and his defiance of Congress, his packing the U.S. attorney's office with Republicans who may seek elected office - is the one that's got the fewest long-range consequences.

Democrats would of course never engage in such behavior. Not unless they're in the White House.