Return of 'The Cynic'

Charles P. Pierce just out with major piece in Esquire (in print but now online) assessing what he, and maybe Obama, has learned since he wrote a June 2008 article in the same magazine as the "cynic" about politics in America.  Pierce pretty much predicted what would happen--that Obama, if elected, would overrate the Republicans, and most citizens', good faith in working for progress.   Now, after attending the two party conventions, he hits the "demented" state of the modern GOP, before concluding, re: Obama:

The cynic wonders if he yet realizes the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil. The cynic wonders, still, if he yet realizes that we are simply not all in this together because a great number of us have such an appetite for the magic incantations of political malpractice that we don't want to be in anything together with the people we are sure those incantations can make disappear for us. He is a rational man. Even his closest friends describe him that way. A rational man can look at an irrational time and its irrational people and he can study them, and he can even, perhaps, understand them. But can he truly fight them without challenging that irrationality at its core?