The plodding of the platitudinous and the vaunting of the vapid had left me with little to be excited about during this year’s primary election campaigns. I had long since ceased to be able to sit through what are laughably termed the “debates” which seemed to be on television every other evening in prime time. In these circus-like affairs, the performers’ task was and is to expel into the chamber and a propos of nothing as many as possible of their focus-group-tested “talking points” while emitting the occasional scripted “one-liner” so as to appear “likable” and at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of the potentially lethal “gaffe.” True, an occasional virtuoso of this admittedly difficult task might appear. Mr. Obama seemed to be one such. As Gail Collins of The New York Times rather amusingly (and revealingly) framed it, “Barack Obama turns out to have a positive genius for making moderation sound exciting.”

Speaking in generalities about the need for bipartisanship while deftly avoiding anything controversial (and therefore partisan) is “moderation” only in the eyes of the media, to whose self-interested penchant for moralizing political conflict Mr. Obama, like most other candidates this year, has been constantly appealing. In other words, Miss Collins’s enthusiasm for him was basically tautological. Mr. Obama was the candidate of the media because he was the best at saying what the media want to hear. But was this rhetorical skill one that anyone could reasonably look on as a qualification for the