It had been the great promise of Barack Obama. From the day he burst onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he sold a dream not only of bridging a racial divide, but of bringing the blue states and the red states into a single mythical, post-partisan United States. It was the thing that Hillary Rodham Clinton was said to be incapable of, as a polarizing figure whose politics were forged in the divisive culture wars of the 1960s. It was a sales pitch that made John McCain scoff with particular bitterness as he pointed to the deep political scars he wore from years of trying to forge bipartisan deals in Congress while Obama had been writing memoirs and voting the party line.
