In an essay for The Atlantic Monthly entitled "Goodbye to All That," Andrew Sullivan presents a novel reason why Obama is fundamentally different from any candidate we've seen in our generation:

Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future.

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At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Vietnam and the culture wars of the 1960s, says Sullivan, have informed political discourse ever since then, and only Obama is young enough not to have politically matured during that time. He has not been affected by the "triumphant post-Reagan conservatism" that has kept Democrats on the defensive since the 1980s. Even today, it seems, Democrats have to justify to the country why their ideas are not ludicrous, while Republican ideas are accepted as normal. Going to war in Iraq? Sounds great. Suggesting we don't go to war in Iraq? Whoa, there, buddy! You'd better have a good reason for us not to go to war. The beauty of the Iraq War is that President Bush didn't have to do very much actual convincing. The narrative of our nation's politics said that the Republicans knew how to protect the nation, so Bush knew best.

Which brings us to why Obama would make a great president: "He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary." Nowhere was the polarization of something as basic as an opinion demonstrated than in 2004. On the one hand, we have George W. Bush, a man who believes so much in his own opinion -- and others' faith in his opinion -- that he has not once changed his mind about anything. He has made no mistakes, and he has no regrets. Undoubtedly, if someone asked if he would do anything about his preidency differently, he wouldsn't have an answer. Even when he is wrong, he refuses to back down, as though his own stubbornness is prima facie evidence of how correct he is -- because, seriously, how could someone who is wrong be so unwilling to admit he's wrong? He dares people to call him on his hubris, and largely, his supporters never do, assuming that he's either completely correct or a totally tactless moron.

John Kerry was on the other end of the spectrum, constantly changing his mind when he realized it would be politically expedient to do so. He famously said of a defense spending bill, "I voted for it before I voted against it." This only gave his opponents more ammunition in their gunfight to demonstrate to voters that he didn't have any firm positions. A successful "Google bomb" shot John Kerry's campaign website to number one as the search result for "waffles."

The fear of Republicans is driving this congress. It's the reason why Democrats have consistently refused to stand up to President Bush when he is urging for the passage of stupid laws, like a provision for warrantless wiretapping. It's the reason why they haven't done the investigations they should be doing. Democrats take Bush's comments about them to heart and are terrified that, after twelve years of being browbeaten by Republicans, the hard-earned gains of 2006 will disappear when voters believe it when the president says that Congress is spending too much money and wasting time with investigations and attempts to end the war in Iraq.

Obama knows that the president is bluffing. He knows that Democrats don't pay any attention to what he says, and the president's conservative audience already doesn't like the Democrats, so there's no reason to pander. Obama isn't afraid of Bush and he isn't afraid of Republicans. It takes a certain amount of idealism to think that you're doing what's right. Bush has that idealism, but he's carried it too far, to the point where he's doing what only he thinks is right and doesn't come to a consensus with anyone. When the Senate intimated that it might not confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, Bush was fine with that. We just won't have an Attorney General, then, he told the Senate. In no uncertain terms, he told them that they would be confirming Michael Mukasey, and if they didn't like it, then he would publicly blame them for the lack of an Attorney General. He would not be nominating anyone else.

Obama, though, is not unilateral. But he's not a chicken. And, says Sullivan, he brings with him more than pragmatism:

If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do.