We seem to have two gifts with no cards! Wah. They were probably just lost in the shuffle, though we tried our best to keep everything together when we transported them from the wedding site to home. So if you read this here blog, and you know of someone who either gave us a super cool picnic set OR steak knives, we’d appreciate the info so we can get dem there thank yews out. Ta!

In the midst of all the wedding festivities, it would seem we finally reached the end of the race and have settled upon a nominee for our Democratic Party. For this, I am glad. He was not my original candidate, but I will not leave the one major party that mirrors my values most closely & has a chance at winning just because we didn't have the good sense to go with Kucinich. I found Hillary's Everyman posturing irritating and patronizing, but of course I would have stuck with the party even if she'd been the nominee. I would have held my nose and taken an extra big swig of bourbon, but what choice would I have had in reality?

I do not know why, but I have been unusually pessimistic and negative about the race and the state of the country in general recently. I see hope no where. I am more apathetic than usual. In some ways I blame moving here, because while I think no city goverment is efficient and trouble-free, this one seems to take the cake on poor management, questionable spending, and Big Money pandering. Watching this mess is enough to make one despair over how goverment runs, I promise you. But the problem is much bigger than here, of course.

So I am not in the best place to be moved by anything Senator Obama says. The times I have found myself stirred – simply by his charisma, sometimes – I purposefully dampen any fledgling enthusiasm I might feel because the truth is that I am not convinced this moment won't be taken away from us. My thoughts run from the more mundane (Republican spin wearing down the sheen of hopeful idealism with every reference to Jeremiah Wright, if they haven't already) to the macabre (there are far too many crazy people in this country with guns for me to imagine Senator Obama won't become the hopeful target of some lunatic skinhead).

Maybe it is in light of all this that I had such a strong reaction yesterday to the following letter from Pete Hamill written to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. He read it aloud on NPR and I started crying. Really crying, like all the hopelessness and despair in the center of my heart wanted to be acknowledged finally. It somehow seemed to me that Hamill got it all right. That the Democratic Party is already ruined. Maybe if we had had Bobby Kennedy it would have been ok. Maybe it wouldn't have been. I don't know; I wasn't alive. Maybe Obama is my generation's chance to rebuild and get it back. I really really hope so. But I think my idealism is dying, and I heard it echoed in this letter. And that made me – even in my newly wedded bliss – indescribably sad.

Dear Bob:

I had wanted to write you a long letter explaining my reasons for why I thought you should make a run for the Presidency this year. But that's too late. I read in the Irish Times this a.m. that you had made a hard announcement, and that small hope is gone, along with others that have vanished in the last four years.

I suspect that all nations have their historical moment, some moment when it all seems to have been put together as an idea: our moment was 1960–63. I don't think it's nostalgia working or romanticism. I think most Americans feel that way now.

The moment is gone now, and we have grown accustomed to living in a country where nobody would protest very much if Jack Valenti replaced John Gardner.

I wanted to say that the fight you might make would be the fight of honor … I wanted to say that you should run because if you won, the country might be saved … If we have LBJ for another four years, there won't be much of a country left. I've heard the arguments about the practical politics which are involved. You will destroy the Democratic Party, you will destroy yourself. I say that if you don't run, you might destroy the Democratic Party; it will end up nationally, the way it has in New York, a party filled with decrepit old bastards like Abe Beame, and young hustlers, with blue hair, trying to get their hands on highway contracts, It will be a party that says to millions and millions of people that they don't count, that the decision of 2,000 hack pols does. They will say that idealism is a cynical joke; that hard-headed pragmatism is the rule, even if the pragmatists rule in the style of Bonnie and Clyde.

I wanted to remind you that in Watts I didn't see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls. I saw pictures of John F Kennedy. That is your capital in the most cynical sense; it is your obligation in another, the obligation of staying true to whatever it was that put those pictures on those walls. I don't think we can afford five summers of blood. I do know this: if a 15-year-old kid is given a choice between Rap Brown and RFK, he might choose the way of sanity. It's only a possibility, but at least there is that chance. Give that same kid a choice between Rap Brown and LBJ, and he'll probably reach for his revolver.

Again, forgive the tone of this letter, Bob. But it's not about five cent cigars and chickens in every pot. It's about the country. I don't want to sound like someone telling someone that he should mount the white horse; or that he should destroy his career. I also realize that if you had decided to run, you would face some filthy politics, and that there are plenty of people in the country who resent or dislike you.

With all of that, I still think the move would have been worth making, and I'm sorry you decided not to make it.

Peter Hamill