Waking up can be both a wondrous and terrifying human endeavor. One can arise refreshed and invigorated or disoriented and frightened. There are many facets to ascending from a state of sleep and they are at once literal and symbolic, physical and metaphysical.  

It can be all about getting up without an alarm clock and feeling as if the world belongs to you and only you or maybe it’s a realization that the path you were on just doesn’t cut it anymore. This is probably why men who are in prison or at war call their release date or their discharge date a "wake up."

Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s recent success in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that America could be poised to wake up from a long dark slumber, a REM-type realm fraught with racism, hate, hypocrisy, political backroom dealing, glad-handing and treachery.

For my part, this "blolumnist" is still a skeptic as I not so whimsically pointed out in a tongue-and-cheek treatment about Fred Thompson. I’m yet to be convinced that America is truly ready to elect a Black man, an African-American a Kenya-Hawaii-Indonesian-White Hybrid or whatever people deem the charismatic candidate to be. Moreover,  it’s hard to get the sleep needed for clear thinking with a 24/7 broadband connection 8,009,657 channels, radio and policy dilettantes who’ve run out of small talk and wish to regale you with the box score they saw on CNN Headline News the night before. This makes it just as easy to be too tired to wake up.

Yeah so if I had to stick to my rest and awakening theme and define what’s happening in the political arena, I would call it sleepwalking. It’s like we got up one day and all of a sudden political coverage -- deployed by a profit-driven media that has long since abandoned its duties as a public trust and settled for a future as a dressed up content provider -- is like watching ESPN.

See if you can tell the difference:

What he needs to do on this next series is pull back a little bit, recognize the signs.

This person is in defensive mode, a defensive position here and will need to adjust going into the final moments.

He has really been good thus far with all the blocking and tackling you need to come through with a decisive victory.

The numbers and stats tell the story

Believe it or not, this ain't blather from the Ohio State game. Those are actual excerpts of nonsensical, vague and open-ended conjecture spewed from the grills of overpaid insiders and make-up powdered pundits who have supplanted hard-digging and critical thinking, forcing speculation to become more a part of our nation’s discourse than at any other time in history.

Regardless of the fact that we heard his voice every hour on the hour, Obama really showed us something in his Iowa victory, more specifically in his acceptance speech. He spoke of a nation united for change. He exuded the type of wide-eyed idealism and oratorical polish that few candidates have displayed in the last 30 years. He gave the mostly-white college students who came out to support him the “hope” he speaks of without irony or sarcasm. Ahead of the primary, on Monday night in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire Barack blanked the perceived front-runner, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, Seven-zip. On Tuesday we emerged from the covers, or the park bench or the disaffected spouse couch to find that perhaps we had been dreaming. He came in second just when we thought he had unshakable, unstoppable, unimpeachable momentum.

Wednesday, the nation awoke to looped tape of Hillary Clinton tearing up as if she’d been awakened from the siesta of presumption the night before. And the armchair quarterbacks were talking about "crying" instead of what a new president will do about unrest in Pakistan, 40,000 pounds of American bombing in Iraq and a looming recession. But that’s not as fun as the "Inside Baseball" approach to this political race.

It's all about discussing and reflecting the emblems of progress, signs of change, icons of history instead of actually bringing any of these things to fruitions. They're not candidates, they are legends in the making made by the media and fed to the American public who will react accordingly when backed into a corner and confronting either their own insecurity or staunch indoctrinations. This race is a race with a big “R” but the media won’t dare play that up until it gets juicy enough to trot out during sweeps week or if the writer’s strike bleeds into the warm months.

Right now no one in the media knows what they’re talking about and worse they don’t care that you know that they know that they don’t know what they’re talking about. This leaves us with the main question -- one that has enlightened American blacks simultaneously inspired and scared of disappointment -- which is whether this nation’s collective eye boogers comprised of personal biases and fear are now thin enough to see a clear choice, to vote issues instead of conscience.

The naked truth, without the usual whimsy atttempted on this page, is that Obama is pound-for-pound the best candidate in an otherwise uninspiring horse marathon imbued with color commentary from partisan jackals and mostly lazy prognosticators masquerading as newspeople.  People talk change all the time, we know where the road leads that is paved with good intentions. We promise to beat traffic at dawn and inevitably choose more often than not to hit the snooze button. I often joke uneasily with my good friend that well-meaning whites and even many minorities will walk right up to the poles this summer ahead of the convention clutching Obama placards and chanting his name only to urge the poll-captain to close the curtain so they can vote for who they really want. My lingering skepticism tells me that it may not be Obama.

Yet the more alarming prospect is that it may actually be Obama, the archetype of the world citizen for the 21st century: Harvard trained, eloquent, good looking, a man of mixed race who is actually not from the loins of slaves. Suddenly we will have a president who might talk about wave grease, who might really dig Jazz and Hip-Hop but not just for the votes, a man who walks with a Southside bop, confident in stride and step, a man no doubt aware of the heavy weight he will carry into the White House from a policy and legacy standpoint. If we are crazy enough, courageous enough, fed up enough for so-called change, we will be forced to have a meaningful and potentially ugly discussion on race, on inequity, on comeuppance, on shattering the status quo, on changing the direction of this two century-old republic. Or we might be so preoccupied with burying the past that the seemingly idealistic Obama will be coerced into joining the old boys club.

But who knows these things?

What we do know is that for the first time in history it’s more likely than ever that the nation will wake up in January of 2009 to find either a woman or a black man addressing a new nation that either realizes that it’s breakfast time or chooses to rollover and catch some more Zs.

Good Night. Good Morning.