LYME, N.H. -- Barack Obama is inspirational but he also possesses good political judgment. This provides a factual basis for his inspirational call for hope.

For example, when he was in the Illinois legislature in the Fall of 2002 when President Bush was trying to sell the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama reasoned as follows:

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, of undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses in the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

Today, one of the leading Republican candidates, John McCain, is proposing a virtually permanent occupation of Iraq, citing the example of South Korea, where the United States has posted tens of thousands of troops for more than 50 years. Mr. McCain implicitly confirms Mr. Obama's prediction -- that in Iraq we would become involved in an occupation of undetermined length, cost and consequences. Indeed, we are now building an enormous U.S. embassy in Iraq and military bases that look permanent.

If Mr. McCain is the Republican nominee, the debate in the fall may center on the wisdom of establishing a decades-long presence in Iraq. Many will make comparisons to South Korea, which, unlike Iraq, at least has defensible borders and a democratic political system that by-and-large welcomes our presence.

William F. Buckley Jr. many years ago defined conservatism as "the politics of reality." With his realism about Iraq, Mr. Obama to that extent qualifies as a conservative.

After the surprise victory of Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, the future of the Democratic race is undetermined. An unexpected surge of older women voters gave Mrs. Clinton her three-point victory. What will happen in Nevada, South Carolina and the Feb. 5 "super primary" we cannot know.

But as we look ahead we would do well to look back for a moment at what I saw in New Hampshire.

On the day before the primary my wife and I went to see Mr. Obama speak in Lebanon, N.H., a small town about 10 miles south of Hanover. Hundreds of people lined up to see him and we barely got a seat. About 400 remained outside in the cold. Mr. Obama was about 15 minutes late, having stopped to talk with the crowd outside.

When he walked onto the stage the entire audience rose and cheered. Not long into his speech, it was obvious that his appeal goes beyond politics. He might have mentioned health care and Iraq, but those were ancillary to the most important thing -- changing the culture of Washington.

Mr. Obama is commanding a movement, not running a campaign, and he has the language and the perfect pitch to make it a powerful political force.

Mrs. Clinton talks about what she will do and how her experience will enable her to get it done; Mr. Edwards talks about battling the special interests, as he has for years. But Mr. Obama always talks about "we."

"This is the moment. Now is the time ..." What "we" can accomplish "beginning now, beginning here today, we can take our country back again. This is the defining moment."

You could feel the excitement.

I haven't seen anything like this in politics before -- and I've written speeches for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and spent 20-plus years covering politics as a syndicated columnist.

Mr. Obama talks about providing medical care for everybody and so forth, but first, he says, "we" must lift the curse from "our" land.

Here, his politics touches a mythic dimension, familiar in the Grail legends. The land suffers. Nothing will grow. After undergoing many trials the knight recovers the Holy Grail and lifts the curse from the land and the crops grow again.

The curse on our land in Mr. Obama's narrative is, of course, the Bush administration: the fear, the endless war (in Afghanistan, in Iraq, maybe in Iran), the lies, the torture, Guantanamo, the trashing of the Constitution, the cancer of incompetence.

All of this has made Americans strangers in their own land. They want their decent America back again. Mr. Obama reaches out to them, promising redemption.

Mr. Obama does not have to mention specific things. He doesn't even mention Mr. Bush. Of course, the Republican candidates also rarely mention Mr. Bush, even though they would continue his policies. They would rather talk about Ronald Reagan. In this, they tacitly agree that Mr. Bush is a curse, the skeleton at the hoped-for feast.

Oprah Winfrey understood the redemptive potential of Mr. Obama in her memorable speech in Columbia, S.C., referring to a scene in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." Oprah said, "Her body all worn and withered and bent over. As she would approach the children she would say to each one, 'Are you the one?' " Oprah did not have to tell her black audience that she was looking for the redeemer.

In the darkest days of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt said "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." That is, if we are not afraid we can do anything. He had overcome polio. At that moment, with a curse on the land, Mr. Roosevelt was "the one."

In South Carolina, most blacks felt a black man could never be elected president. But after Mr. Obama's landslide in very white Iowa and a strong showing in very white New Hampshire, polls show that blacks are shifting away from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama.

Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator, was assassinated on Good Friday, 1865. In November, my guess is that Mr. Obama will win the presidency, lifting the curse from the land and completing Lincoln's work. As Prince Hamlet said, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we will."