To spare you, regular Shades of Gray correspondent and Jane Greer and I have been having a dialog off-line—the grownup version of a fight behind the school—about Barack Obama: whether he deserves all the love he's getting, or whether his followers are as dumb as they are hopeful.

It's not just Jane who's asking, essentially, "Where's the beef?" about Obama, wanting to know, beyond all the great speeches, what sort of change does he actually represent, what does he actually give us reason to hope for? It's all the speechwriters wanted to talk about at our conference in Washington, it's all my liberal friends are asking each other in the bar.

Here—and these may be added to or subtracted from as the campaign unfolds—are the reasons I gave Jane for my support for Obama, after I acknowledged that Obama's platform is built on mostly conventional liberal ideas:

• He is a tremendous writer and speaker, so he can compellingly get his ideas across domestically, and diplomatically get America's ideas across internationally. (At least he can do this publicly; I have no idea how persuasive he is person-to-person in legislative hallways or in one-on-one meetings.)

• Yes, "unity" is bullshit—Americans have honest and important disagreements—but Obama got his start on the national political scene by expressing his interest in focusing on the copious common ground that does exist between red-staters and blue-staters. As opposed the Bush administration's m.o. of finding just the right place, between 51% and 49%, to hammer in a wedge. As a communicator, as an American, I have to be encouraged by Obama's approach. (McCain and Clinton are both far better than Bush and Rove on this score; in fact, McCain may have as much uniting to do as Obama.)

• He seems the most emotionally solid (aside from Huckabee, actually) of the candidates. He really comes across as easy with people. Which usually means a person is easy with himself. (As opposed to McCain, who sometimes seems easy with himself and other times seems to be bursting at the seams, as if someone shot a load of rage up his ass. And Hillary, who's got that freaky, noisy Gatlin Gun laugh.) All of us who work with other people know that emotional intelligence is often at least as important as any other factor in being effective. Obama seems most likely, to me, to reflect on what he is doing, to change his mind if he concludes that he is doing something dumb.

• He has managed to create a campaign fund mostly on small contributions from goofs like me—as opposed to giant gifts from corporations like Pfizer and Exxon—so I feel he's more likely to represent me (and not Pfizer) if he gets into office.

• He's worked as an organizer in the howling Chicago ghettos. Riding through these on the El train when I first move to Chicago at 23 from leafy, suburban Ohio—and reading Alex Kotlowitz's book There Are No Children Here—I decided that this shame was the worst shame and the most urgent problem America had. My wife teaches in the inner city, and so the economic and educational poverty issue in the inner city affects us day. We think Obama understands it more deeply and in more subtle detail than anyone else.

• Yes, goddamnit, he's multiracial and comes across as a citizen of the world and the least likely to project or betray an asinine and incorrect and counter productive America-Is-The-Center-of-the-World image that unnecessarily enraged citizens in other countries long before 9/11, long before terrorism became a threat. With India and China growing in economic and military power, we must begin to project a less my-way-or-highway foreign policy, because reality will project it for us.

That's it (unless I'm forgetting some). But hell! That's a lot! Isn't it?