I am no expert on campaign finance reform. But I’ve followed the issue for a long time.So when I got asked over breakfast about the headlines covering Obama’s opting out of public financing, I started trying to lay out the basics. And I was surprised about how remarkably straightforward the issue actually is.

We’ve always been concerned about the influence of money in politics. In the past such influence has taken the form of a relative handful of wealthy donors, and people fronting for businesses, filling campaigns’ warchests. This was a problem for democracy because this handful of people would almost certainly have an undue influence, directly or indirectly, on the politician they helped elect.

Public financing came along as an antidote — a way for large numbers of not-so-wealthy individuals to pool their contributions, using the government as a middleman, so that they could help finance the campaigns of politicians who didn’t want to take big contributions from the wealthy few. If they won, these officials wouldn’t be beholden to a small coterie of fat cats; they’d have been funded by a vast crowd. That seemed like a good road for democracy.

So here comes Obama. His campaign has managed — through both the general enthusiasm of his following and through very savvy use of the Internet — to assemble something unprecedented in American politics: a multitude of small contributors (something like a million and a half people) who have swelled his campaign chest by ponying up a huge volume of modest amounts.

In a sense, Obama is already a publicly financed candidate. The government used to be the middleman; now the Internet plays the same role. As I read cynical takes on Obama’s move (like that of David Brooks), I can’t help thinking: isn’t this what public financing was all about? Isn’t pooling a multitude of small individual contributions the ideal way of financing a political campaign? Don’t we want more campaigns to be like Obama’s? What exactly is the problem?

As they put it over at Mother Jones:

By opting out of the public financing system, Obama is acknowledging that money will always play a crucial role in American politics. But by discouraging donations to independent groups, focusing on small donors, and refusing PAC and lobbyist money, he’s also trying to insure that money plays the right role in American politics.

Bearings are the calculations a navigator makes to stay on course. “Losing your bearings” means, essentially, losing your compass — going off course.

When Obama last night suggested that McCain was “losing his bearings” in suggesting that Obama was in cahoots with Hamas, the choice of words was provocative, sure. Obama was saying that McCain presents himself as an unconventional high-road politician, but here had instead taken a low potshot. He’d lost his moral compass.

Here are Obama’s words:

“This is offensive, and I think it’s disappointing, because John McCain always says, ‘Well, I’m not going to run that kind of politics.’ And then to engage in that kind of smear, I think, is unfortunate, particularly since my policy toward Hamas has been no different than his,” Obama said.

The Illinois senator added: “For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination. We don’t need name-calling in this debate.”

But the McCain people’s charge that it was a cheap shot about the candidate’s age suggests that they have, um, further lost their bearings.

Now, if Obama had said “McCain has lost his marbles”? Yeah, that might’ve been a comment about age. And — since “bearings” also has another meaning, for mechanical parts that are similar to, er, marbles — maybe there’s even a little bit of a taunt behind the word choice, an extremely subtle reference to McCain’s reputation for sputtering anger. But that’s not what the McCain people are complaining about.

With one campaign organization on guard against racial digs and the other defensive about age-ism, it’s going to be a fun election season!

When the history of this strange and soon-to-be-concluded Democratic primary season is written, let it be noted that the candidate whose income was modest (in political-class terms) until his books became bestsellers was somehow framed as the representative of the elite — while the one who was able to dip into her own personal coffers to fund her campaign to the tune of $6 million succeeded, with a little help from the media, in casting herself as a woman of the people.

Because I’m on the road I didn’t get to listen to Obama’s Tuesday speech until last night. I’d heard a mixture of reactions to it already — from one friend’s “best political speech of my lifetime” to another’s “not sure he put the controversy to rest.”

So I fired up the browser and tuned in.

First thing I realized: this is one lengthy piece of substantive political argument! After two terms of an incoherent chief executive and a couple decades of soundbite-driven political culture, it felt anachronistic yet oddly invigorating to settle in and realize that I was in for nearly 40 minutes of a well-constructed speech with a long sweep. Obama did not, as Dave Winer put it, “take the shortcuts.” The high road is also, sometimes, a long road.

Second thing I realized: Obama is not only a “great speaker” in the sense that his voice can soar and he can fire up a crowd; he is also able to summon more than one effective style. For most of this speech on race, he ditched the grand oratory and hit calm, somewhat informal, conversational notes: he was like your incredibly articulate friend across a dinner table, going deep into a political argument by increasingly personal anecdotes, gradually getting more passionate as the minutes pass.

Finally, I realized that the speech was a big gamble. As Jay Rosen wrote, it was a challenge to the media — a gauntlet thrown down at the cable networks’ reductive, infinite-loop approach to complex issues. But it was even more a challenge to his audience, to all of us, to listen with less impatience, to think for one moment a little less about the short strokes of one presidential race and a little more about the long arc of our national story.

In substance the speech was deeply pragmatic: It called on the groups that make up the American polis to stop objectifying one another because that simply distracts us from our opportunity to solve some big problems. That’s a practical argument: stop fighting because we’ve got work to do.

The speech’s idealism lay rather on a kind of meta level. In its length, its willingness to delve into history, its plea for us to embrace the complexities of our present conflicts by understanding their roots, it implicitly rejected the dominant mode of American political discourse since Ronald Reagan transformed it in 1980. Yes, Obama’s speech contained anecdotes. Yes, it contained soundbites. But these were the building blocks of something larger and more consequential.

Yes, Obama told us, we can have a political conversation informed by intelligence and nuance and a sense of history. We are not doomed to live forever in the Bush administration’s universe of stunted understanding, or the cable networks’ academy of closed minds.

Is he right? Will his gamble pay off? I’d like to think so. But it might be the most audacious hope of all.

UPDATE: Nick Kristof in the Times starts off with the same point — calling the speech “an acknowledgment of complexity, nuance and legitimate grievances on many sides” — before veering off in a different direction. (Hadn’t read him before I wrote this…)

Dave Winer asked to talk with me for a few minutes this morning for a primary post-mortem. (Actually, post mortem is entirely the wrong term in this case, since both candidates’ campaigns are alive and kicking hard.) His post is here, and here’s a link to the audio.

Here’s something I mentioned that hasn’t gotten much media attention yet but will, I think, in coming months. One criterion that seems to have emerged in this election, thanks to Hillary’s ads, is, “Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 AM?” Hillary says, “Trust me, you know I can handle it better than Obama.” Personally I don’t buy that. But the really important point is that, whichever of them ends up as the Democratic candidate, John McCain is going to step forward and tell Americans that he’s their 3 AM man.

This image of McCain as a figure of stability and trust is pure fiction. Just Google “McCain temper” and you’ll find a litany of observations from members of his own party that he is “irrational.” Former conservative Republican congressman John LeBoutillier has said, “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”

I doubt there’s much evidence to go that far. But McCain’s temper is legendary. This apparently has nothing to do with his experience as a POW (which, according to some accounts, actually helped teach him to deal with a temper that had been even more volcanic before). It’s just part of his personality and leadership style.

I’ve worked for bulging-veined bosses. (Though not, fortunately, in a long time.) And I don’t want one running the country.

As of around 7:30 pm California time here on Super Tuesday night, a look at the New York Times web site shows a remarkable pattern in the Democratic primaries:

As you can see, Obama wins the states up until “M”; Hillary wins from M through Z. (If you can’t see, click the picture for a full-sized image.)

If the pattern holds, the Obama folks may have a big win in California on the way.

This is about as reliable as the numerology that sometimes passes for market-timing prediction on Wall Street. But, hey, it’s a pattern!

This year we Democrats are in a rare and lucky position: we’ve got two good candidates to choose from. On Tuesday, I’m voting for Obama over Hillary. But in November, I’ll be happy to vote for either of them.

Right now, my preference is based on the following considerations:

Pressing the reset button internationally. After the last eight years, the U.S. needs to start over with the rest of the world. It’s hard to remember today, but there was a brief moment after 9/11 when the whole world was behind the U.S. What that moment called for was a unity government — and indeed, a diplomacy of global unity. Bush threw all that away in a blaze of arrogant partisanship and a go-it-alone rush to a misbegotten war. In the process he wrecked his own reputation and the nation’s.

Obama’s in a position to clear the decks and press “reset” with all of the strategic goofs and moral gaffes of the last eight years — and he’s in a better position to do so than Hillary. He was against the Iraq war, unequivocally, from day one. His briefer sojourn in the Beltway means there’s more of a chance he’ll be willing to try new approaches.

The Muslim factor. Obama’s time spent abroad, including his familiarity with Indonesia’s Muslim culture, has led to a scurrilous whisper campaign against him, suggesting that he’s Muslim himself. (Hey, change one letter of his name and you get Osama!) It’s a lie, but lies have been known to turn elections.

It seems certain to me that if Obama is the candidate, he’ll have to confront this lie directly at some point. More importantly, I think he can turn it around to his advantage. Because at this moment in history, we could really use a person in the White House who actually knows something about Muslim culture and society.

As we struggle to defeat Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, we need to carry the conflict back to the hearts and minds of the moderate Muslim world, which Bush — through policy errors, strategic blindness and moral failures — has ceded to our enemies. Obama represents a rare opportunity to reclaim this ground.

Electability. Hillary Clinton is a known factor to the American electorate. She has a lot of support. But it’s hard for me to see how she’s going to get too much more than she has today. And while this year’s GOP is comatose, her face remains one of the few stimuli that could conceivably cause the Republican right to hold its nose and vote for McCain.

Obama is simply a wild card. It could be that large numbers of white Americans will smile and nod and, in the privacy of the voting booth, decide not to support a black man. I think it’s worth testing that legacy against contemporary reality.

In the primaries so far, Obama’s been rallying young and disaffected voters back into the voting booth. That could make a huge difference in November: rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way. It’s hard to see how Hillary could manage that.

Positive vibration. It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud. That’s part of his success story, and, evidently, part of his personality. It has worked beautifully to date, and it might work all the way through the election. But it worries me a bit.

When the GOP turns the slime machine on full blast, will Obama be able to deflect or defeat it? We just don’t know. Maybe his charisma will pull through; maybe he’ll show the charm and grace that Kerry just couldn’t muster and, with smiles and deft one-liners, sidestep the crap that will surely fly at him and defang the attack dogs.

But the hard-earned conventional political wisdom of the last decade is that when they come at you swinging slurs, your only choice is to hit back hard and fast. That doesn’t seem to be Obama’s way. And it’s a little troubling for any Democrat to contemplate a candidate who isn’t ready to rumble.

Still, I’ve always believed in voting one’s hopes over one’s fears!