It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

When we were covering the 2008 campaign I told my young African American colleagues that despite the historical significance of victory, Barack Obama was going to break their hearts. They didn't want to hear that, and they refused to believe it. Eighteen months later they started dropping by one by one to say, sadly: "He broke our hearts." A couple of them even wept.

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

There's hardly a more bitter pill to take than when a President disappoints the people who most believed in him.

Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party. No more roguish and rowdy band of predators ever did more to demean and despoil the democracy on whose carcass they feed.