Obama the Alchemist?

Gary Kamiya over at Salon.com has this to say about Obama this morning:

Barack Obama’s stunning victory in Iowa was a moment of national alchemy. It represented an outpouring of righteous Democratic anger, and its simultaneous transformation into hope. That double process — the cathartic expression of rage, and its purification — is exactly what Democrats have needed after seven nightmarish years of Bush. It is politics both as payback, and as spiritual transcendence. And the fact that it is a black man who is serving as America’s philosopher’s stone, turning the base metal of bitterness into the gold of forgiveness, is extraordinarily moving. The possibility that our nation’s deepest wound, and the source of our political divisions, could also be the agent of our redemption is like a banner appearing in a darkened sky.