Andrew Sullivan on The Colbert Report

"We have a chance to win those people over and to make the world love America again."

Go read his article on Barack Obama in The Atlantic Monthly.

Here's a snippet:

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. 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. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

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.

So not only is Barack Obama one of the most inspiring candidates we have ever seen and represents a multi-cultural America of the future, but he offers us an opportunity to send the most self-absorbed generation packing. Because aren't you getting a bit bored by all the retrospectives that come out every five years or so which are meant to remind all of us that 1968 was, like, the most important year EVER? I don't know about you, but I wasn't even born then and I am old. Don't you think it is about time the next generation had a chance to try to change the world?