THE BUCKETS-OF-MONEY LIST

I was annoyed last year when David Ehrenstein, in an L.A. Times op-ed, described Barack Obama as a "Magic Negro" -- an idealized figure who, in whites' fantasies, could emerge from nowhere and magically heal what was believed to need healing. Ehrenstein wasn't entirely wrong about how some whites view Obama -- but I thought he was wrong to single Obama out as a politician whose supporters regard him as possessing "magic." Highly successful pols of all races are looked at that way (trust me on this -- I'm from a city where the JFK photos had pride of place in many homes, including my Italian-American grandmother's, for years if not decades after the assassination). Even as Ehrenstein was writing, Rudy Giuliani was positioning himself as the Magic City Slicker, able to tame Hitlery and Islamofascists the way he tamed squeegee men, and the fact that he's still leading (if barely) in some national polls, in a party whose core members have little in common with him, tells me that that the ability to inspire a belief in magic doesn't require a whole lot of melanin.

The Magic Negro, Ehrenstein tells us, is a Hollywood stock character, often played by Morgan Freeman; Freeman has a new movie out called The Bucket List, in which (I'm told -- I haven't seen it) he plays an "an intellectual who was forced by family obligations to become an auto mechanic ... wise, baritonal, and eloquent." In the movie, he and stinking-rich Jack Nicholson decide to use their declining years to do all the things they've dreamed of doing before they kick the bucket.

The Bucket List comes to mind when I read about the oldsters who plan to meet in Oklahoma next Sunday. Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, David Boren, Gary Hart, John Danforth, Christie Todd Whitman -- you can't help thinking this is a group of people who all have the same one-item bucket list: "Become president." And though the Washington Post article about the confab describes former senator Boren as the host and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article focuses on Nunn, it's clear that the whole point of this is to rally around Bloomberg, who's one of them but who is believed to have agency because, unlike them, he still wins elections, and is stinking rich to boot. He's their Magic Moneybags.

I hear from people like Andrew Sullivan that there's a profound desire in America for an end to partisan sniping, and that, in fact, the desire is greatest among Generation X-ers and their juniors. If that were true, you'd think there might be a few one- or two-term former elected officials (or unsuccessful candidates) under fifty, or even under forty, at the Bloomberg confab -- young post-partisans who see a new world just waiting to be born and seek help from wise snowy-haired sages in bringing the new into being. But no -- the group consists solely of the decidedly aged.

Some people really believed this would be the election cycle that ended poisonous partisanship; instead, what we have is the partisanship expanding so much that it's now gone intramural. Primary seasons can get ugly, but this is the first one I can remember in which it seems utterly impossible for any of the people who could really win the nomination (Obama and Clinton, Huckabee and Romney) to mend fences and join up as a ticket, for reasons that have nothing to do with political stances and everything to do with how much the candidates seem to hate each other.

So I think we're stuck with anger and partisanship. And yes, I think Bloomberg will join the race -- Ross Perot with a posse -- as the guy who's angry at anger, thus increasing the anger quotient.