Our left blogohemisphere is getting quite excited about Sen Barack Obama’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination over the pond. It’s like Howard Dean never screamed, hurrah!

And there’s quite a lot to get excited about - as this video shows (thanks, parburypolitica!): Top orator, Impeccable community politics CV, all career moves covered by good altruistic reasons. He’s a kind of fantasy football candidate, and if he loses will have a great potential career playing inspirational presidents in disaster movies.

Naysaying seems to be focused around good old fashioned racism (including his rather unfortunate middle name of Hussein), his lack of cash and national campaign team, and possibly more tellingly that he’s new kid on the block, without the Washington experience of Howard Dean, let alone Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, watching the vid confused me a little. He does a great spiel on breaking down false divisions between red & blue, though I wondered a bit who he was trying to reach out to. The hardcore religious right deal in moral absolutes, so might be pretty immune to the shades of grey involved in trade-off politics and coalition building. For every one he won over with talk of worshipping “an awesome god” in the blue states, he probably alienated them again straight away by acknowledging the mere existence of “gay friends” in the red states.

As a tack for uniting those on the near right, with self-hating liberal tendencies though, I think it might work very well!

Maybe he is actually Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest character - trying to sucker the two sides into something which will make them both look silly.

Jak sie masz?