I don't know who on this planet has the stature to go face-to-face with Bill Clinton and look him in the eye and tell him he behaved in a discreditable fashion. His wife? His buddy Vernon Jordan? Whoever it is, someone had better stop him. He campaigned against a fellow Democrat no differently than if Obama had been Newt Gingrich. The Clinton campaign may conclude that, numerically and on balance, Bill helped. But, trust me, to the thousands of committed progressives who supported him when he really needed it, who went to the mat for him at his moment of (largely self-inflicted) crisis but who now happen to be supporting someone other than his wife, he's done himself a tremendous amount of damage.

If the American economy is not now in recession, it is close enough not to make a practical difference to sentiment. For much of past year equity investors could take comfort from three bullish factors. First was that the Federal Reserve would rescue both the markets and the economy, as it has done so often before. Second, even if the American economy faltered, the rest of the world (particularly Asia) could take up the burden of producing global growth. Third, given the global picture, corporate profits could stay high.

All three assumptions are now coming under question.

Will the media raise this issue? Probably not, since it clearly cuts against John McCain and in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong. Will McCain's political adversaries raise the issue? Maybe, but it'll be hard for it to have a big effect, since in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong and launching this sort of attack on him will prompt a backlash and be viewed as underhanded.

Stone is one of those rare polarizing figures with the ability to irritate both the right and left; the former for obvious reasons, the latter because his paranoid bluster gives heft to the conservative caricature of liberals as a pack of crazies. Nutty as he is, Stone's always struck me as a true believer, even a swooner.

Ron Paul has now done something that Rudy Giuliani has never done. The anti-war congressman from Texas, who famously tangled with Mr. 9/11 over foreign policy in the only interesting GOP debate, has finished in the top tier of a Republican caucus or primary contest.

"America's mayor" either wins Florida -- where he has camped out as the other candidates have slogged through Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Michigan, Nevada and now south Carolina -- or there really is no way to make a case for carrying his bizarre campaign forward.

Are demonstrations of any use, some ask, when resistance is so unyielding? Would the slower processes of legislation and law enforcement ultimately accomplish greater results more painlessly? Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement. The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation of conflict cries out for its intervention. Beyond this, demonstrations have a creative effect on the social and psychological climate that is not matched by the legislative process.

OK -- I don't like politicians speaking in churches. I'm behind (or way ahead of) the times. It's not my kind of thing, and the beginning of Barack Obama's speech today at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is the kind of verbiage that doesn't click with me. When Bill Clinton endorsed Gray Davis from a church pulpit in California seemed just as bad as Karl Rove orchestrating offensive RNC mailers to church parish rosters.

But all that said, Obama's lines here are impressive, and brave.

The new occupant of the Oval Office can but hope today's dislike for America is directed at a leader, not at a country. That may well be, but one thing is for sure. Never again will the US occupy that extraordinary position of supremacy – military, moral and economic – that it held in the interlude between the demise of Communism and the attacks of September 2001.

To the 44th President falls the task of explaining that truth to the country, as well as dealing with the concrete day-to-day problems left by George Bush. Indeed, one wonders, why would anyone want the job?