AN APT ANOLOGY:

Two studies in the charisma of hope: Obama and Bill Clinton (Richard Bernstein, February 27, 2008, NY Times)

One of the advertising posters prominently on view in New York City's subways these days shows a man's head in silhouette beneath a dreamy blue bubble inside of which is this caption: "If I can dream it, I can win it."

The poster is an inducement to buy tickets for the state lottery, the profits of which go to the worthy cause of public education. So why not? Buy lottery tickets. They're only a dollar apiece, and, as that subway poster says just below the dreaming man: "Hey, you never know."

Well, actually, you do know, or you should know, because the lottery's official Web site tells you. The odds that a single ticket purchase will get you the jackpot, currently $12 million, are exactly 175,711,536 to 1, the Web site informs us. To have a 50-50 shot of winning the $12 million, you would have to buy roughly 88 million $1 tickets.

In other words, being able to dream it has nothing to do with being able to win it. And yet, as they say, hope does seem to spring eternal, and never more so than in America these days.

It is, needless to say, Barack Obama who has explicitly put hope way up there on the national agenda and it's been that way since the beginning of his national prominence.