These past few weeks I’ve begun to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish. Sullivan writes for The Atlantic, and it says much for this publication that it values the mix of his many contradictions. (Side note, I couldn’t be prouder of James Bennet, someone I played with as a kid, who has grown up to become an extraordinary journalist and the editor of The Atlantic.)

Sullivan looks forward to the speech Obama plans to give tomorrow.

I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man’s explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger. And I would think much, much less of Obama if he had never opened himself to this subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments. That he has done all this - while still attempting to reform and explain it - is a remarkable achievement. Maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. But the promise of Obama is that his campaign appears poised to show that America is ready for this - and the immense healing it would bring.

And so we are suspended between the old politics and the new, between a Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready and may never be ready for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defense - and an Obama who offers all of us a chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.

He may fail; and the Clintons may be proven right. But he may also succeed - and what a mighty success that would be. These things are never easy; and we were lulled perhaps into an illusion that they could be. So now the real struggle starts. And it will not end with an Obama presidency; it ends with a shift from below that makes an Obama presidency possible.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disagreed with my pastors, sometimes enough to walk out on them, almost never enough to walk out on the community around them. Recently I have walked out, finally bent past breaking by a deceitful man shepherding our parish. Rev. Wright said some things worth challenging and throwing back at him, but from what I’ve read and seen he said many more things that would nourish my soul and keep me coming back if I lived in his neighborhood. I love the thought of a President who can hold such tensions in his spirit and still lead with hope and vision.

An election season like this one will get you talking. You may talk with family, friends, even strangers about what you think about your candidate or cause. Mary points to a diary on DailyKos that takes a stab at helping us all be more persuasive in our rhetoric. It is a tough, fairly academic read, but I highly recommend it. It reminds us that if we really want to persuade someone we should consider who they are and where they are coming from.

One of the reasons I support Barack Obama is that I have a glimmer of hope that he might be the kind of leader that reminds his staff that they are sworn the United States of America, not the President. Now that’s not everybody, many White House staff do serve the President, but many key figures in any administration are actually sworn to uphold our Constitution, not to protect the President.

I was reminded of this today while listening to a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg at the University of Minnesota last week (here’s the MP3 audio). In responding to a mea-culpa written by Robert McNamara about the mistakes that led to Vietnam War (look for it at just about the midpoint of the interview), Ellsberg stresses that the failure was much deeper than what McNamara owns up to. He describes how clearly many advisors saw the looming disaster and how they told the President about what they thought would happen, but they never told anyone else (see 00:49:26 in the audio).

Should [Clark] Clifford have kept his mouth shut about that advice all those years? Ball, Hughes, Humphrey, told the President what they thought, but when they were overruled told nobody else. Like me in 1964-65 or all that period. Actually, if I’d heard that advice in ‘65 at my level I would have been very struck by it. I don’t think I would have volunteered to go to Vietnam as I did later that summer. So the lesson I would draw to people like McNamara, who by ‘65 and ‘66 [...] had learned all of those lessons: we’re running into a nationalism that will not quit, they’re not going to give up, they’re going to kill and die, they’re going to die at a rate of ten to one, ten of them to one of us, but as Ho Chi Minh said to the French “but in the end it is you that will tire” (he said that in 1946, almost 30 years before the end of the war).

If you know that you are heading for a disaster, as McNamara did by ‘66, then think again about putting your promise to your President to keep secrets, and your promise to yourself about your career [...], think again about putting that ahead of your oath to the Constitution. McNamara didn’t take an oath to the President, he acts as if he did, and neither did I, and neither did the soldiers, the officers, neither did Congress; they took an oath to defend and support the Constitution of the United States. And I and McNamara and Clifford and Ball and all the congressmen who knew better were violating that oath every time, after they became aware, and they all became aware, that the Constitution was being flouted, that laws were being violated, and that these crimes were heading into a national disaster.

So, the advice [...] that I’ve been giving the last couple of years to people in my old position is: don’t do what I did. Don’t wait till the war has started, or a new war has started as in Iran. Don’t wait till the bombs are falling or thousands more have died before you go to the press and to Congress with documents, with your own name where you can be cross-examined, your credibility can be tested. You will lose your clearance if you were to do this. You will lose your career. You will lose your job. But you might save hundreds of thousands of lives, and that’s worth it.

What future President would be willing to sit his Cabinet down on day one and play Ellsberg’s advice for them? Can anyone in that position of power recall that this is about our country, not ourselves? Right now Obama seems to be building a movement that is about more than just himself. Will it be a movement that helps our country remember itself and the greatness of its Constitution and people?

Here’s something I missed last November: Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, went to work on the Obama campaign.

As a demonstration of the work he has done for the campaign, Hughes took the audience on a tour of Facebook’s Obama-centric pages, urging audience members to join the One Million Strong for Barack Obama group. Hughes also showcased the “Obama application,” which displays all the latest news and videos on Obama and allows users to vote for whether or not they want the article to show on their profile. Hughes said that the Obama campaign recognizes the importance of peer-to-peer engagement, which he said is more effective than direct marketing.

“[Obama] really will change the tone of politics,” Hughes said.

This reminds me of “the bus” that Jim Collins describes in Good to Great. It seems like Obama really has the right people on the bus. Is it any wonder that he has an online strategy that works and attracts a whole new generation to politics if he is hiring people like this? Can you imagine Washington run this way?

I’ve been so impressed by the Obama campaign, at every level. From the beautiful website that hardly lets you pass go until you’ve signed up for the team, to the typeface they use, to the logo and the other artists who join forces even if they are not part of the paid staff.

But most impressive has been the way Obama uses language to draw each of us into the movement that is rising around him. In his articulation of the campaign it is rarely about him, it is about us. He talks of “this campaign” and what “we” can do.

Today Bob Harris caught another example of this attention to the little things that make such a big difference in the Obama campaign.

… the ad begins with “[i]f you are ready for change” — so that everything that follows is conditional: it’s you, not Obama, who is ultimately responsible for the future. If you don’t vote for Obama, the continuing mess is your own fault. But if you do — “[t]heir days of setting the agenda are over.”

I know the campaign will stumble and this won’t be easy, but right now these folks sure make it look simple and full of grace.

I like my brother Christopher’s vision of leadership. He calls us to dare to be brave. Easier said than done, though he has been pretty good at doing it lately. Luckily, Christopher is working on a book that may add a few more hints for us mere mortals!