I’m not very interested in what Barack Obama calls the “politics of hope” although it sounds like a book I’d like to read. I much prefer partisanship. In the United States, it’s the way things get done. I do not believe that the election of Senator Obama would cause Republicans and Democrats to suddenly see the light and embrace their neighbours across the aisle, or that it would change their deeply held views about Iraq, taxes, or healthcare. A President Obama may very well set a more noble tone for his administration, but President Carter tried something similar, and look where it got him.

But whose textbook would Obama have us follow instead? The one from England, where a parliamentary system (not to mention a monarch) injects a certain civility into the political machinery? Or maybe the one from the South

Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, named “the world’s happiest country,” by a study measuring well-being. Here in the United States , what Obama derides as “partisanship” is actually the way to untangle the gridlock in Washington.

After decades of split majorities, narrow majorities, and modest goals set by cautious administrations and Congress, robust legislative majorities and expert practitioners of partisan politics can achieve impressive results. Partisan politics is an opportunity to build something unseen since Franklin Roosevelt. Hillary Clinton was right to note that President Lyndon Johnson got important laws such as the Civil Rights Act through Congress, and I’m hopeful that working with a strong Democratic majority, she can enjoy similar success. Am I the only one who dreams of what a President Clinton and Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D) of Illinois — a bright, effective leader in the mould of LBJ — can do together?

I also worry that Obama might make the novice’s error that, frankly, Bill Clinton made in 1992 (and Mrs. Clinton is more likely to avoid). As I noted to friends at the time, too many young people got too many good jobs in the White House. It’s a tough business running a country. You need to believe in something better than yourself, but you also need to know how to win in an intensely political environment. Obama’s supporters seem to be inspired by his appeal to our better selves, just as I was inspired a generation ago when Robert F Kennedy said: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Kennedy, like the woman who holds his Senate seat today, was a keen player of, yes, textbook politics. Like President Clinton (and now, Mike Huckabee), I believe in Hope. As for a political strategy, I believe more in a place called the finish line. — The Christian Science Monitor