Considering the Roman philosopher Cicero’s contention that a man never really puts his mind to a subject until he writes on it, I haven’t really thought much about health care since the Clinton years.

From 1992 to 1996, I wrote about it at The Herald-Times, capping my career there with a 13-part series in 1996 called Healthcare at the Crossroads, which explored the “driving forces behind health-care reforms” in Bloomington and the nation.

Until lately, about the only thought I’ve given the subject, aside from its role in society and politics, is when I enter the amount my health insurance company deducts each month into my checkbook. I’ve gone years between doctor visits and have not submitted a claim in the eight years I've been buying my own insurance.

Well, a never-ending yen for new professional challenges, combined with an up-close-and-personal encounter with mortality (nothing serious, just expensive), have convinced me it’s time to revisit the subject of health care.

It's Obama instead of Ol' Bomber. What a relief!

At last, after all these dark and terrible years, we might have a man in the White House who doesn't stoke our fears and look about for enemies to taunt.

The one advantage of that endless election campaign was that it gave us time to see that Obama is obviously sane. How refreshing!

He doesn't immediately brand as an "enemy" any country that disagrees with us. Everything isn't U.S. versus T.H.E.M. He doesn't feed the national paranoia that those Bush Crazies whipped up out of 9/11. He doesn't wave weapons and middle fingers when he's speaking of foreign policy.

As someone wisely noted: when things get hot, you want a cool leader. Obama is warmhearted but coolheaded. That's what we desperately need. If you don't believe that's what we need, look at the last seven years:

I've seen you at rallies cheering for the charismatic junior senator from Illinois. Overheard you in coffee shops discussing Barack Obama's performance at the presidential debates. Spoke with you about the prospects of the Democratic ticket while making our way across campus. And on the morning after this historic election, together we pondered the implications, and the possibilities, of this remarkable achievement.

Truth be told, I'm a little envious. When I cast my first vote in a presidential election, nearly 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan won the presidency, and I was on the wrong side of history. Today, you are on the cusp of what President-elect Obama rightly described as a "defining moment."

The election of 1980 gave birth to the Reagan Revolution: an era marked by rampant militarism, the rise of free market fundamentalism and an ideological attack on the social, economic and political gains of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement. Today's divisive politics and economic calamity are, in large measure, the legacy of the Reagan years.

As one who has spent his entire journalistic career standing up to or railing against the God-Guns-and-Greed coalition that has dominated American life and politics since the late 1970s, I must say that observing politics this year has been gratifying, to say the least.

Regardless of what happens Tuesday, watching the likes of Sarah Palin, "Joe the Plumber" and George W. Bush exposed as liars, thugs and thieves has been a blast, not to mention supremely confirming.

Good God. Palin didn't say "No!" to the Bridge to Nowhere, she abused her power as governor, and she pals around with hate-filled secessionists. Joe isn't his name, he doesn't have a license to plumb, and he doesn't pay his taxes. (But he does have an agent.)

Palin and Samuel Wurzelbacher are indeed the poster kids for those who have spent the last three decades aiding and abetting the James Dobsons, Timothy McVeighs and Ken Lays of our society. They represent the ugliest Americans, and the American people appear to be telling them to screw off.

It's almost enough to inspire hope. But then, as a lifelong Hoosier, I can attest that there is no cure for this strain of American Ugly. If Barack Obama is elected on Tuesday, the virus will mutate, and it will only get uglier. You can count on that.

Editor's note: Gregory Travis is still down with the flu and asked that this column from Sept. 4, 2005, be rerun.

What's the agenda? To kill off national and local government as an instrument of social relief and progress. Why? To replace it with a government of patronage for vested corporate interests.

That's the subtext of the national Republican administration, so successful in their overseas distraction that 200,000 people, most of them of the wrong political demographic, were left stranded and dying for a week in New Orleans.

Editor's note: Gregory Travis is down with the flu this week and asked that this column from March 6, 2006, be rerun. It's more relevant than ever, he says.

Indiana is the trucking "Crossroads of America" where, apparently, an economy based on little more than storing-and-forwarding stuff made elsewhere can be a healthy and sustainable economy. At least if you believe Morton Marcus.

A couple of weeks ago Marcus wrote of Hendricks County, located to Indianapolis' west, as a place booming with both the second-highest population and the second-highest median income growth in the state.

How did it get that way? By being a warehousing "Mecca," hard against the Indianapolis airport and ready-made to store-and-forward goods produced in one place to consumers located in another.

Dear Smiley-face Doll from Alaska, listen please:

You've accused Barack Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists." You were speaking of a professor named William Ayers, who got way too angry in his youth.

When Ayers was an alleged "terrorist" Obama was a 7-year-old boy who didn't know him. Ayers was violently opposed to the Vietnam War, as was a large proportion of the American public at the time. The Pentagon was a target because that's who was running that misbegotten war. Millions of Americans opposed that war because the United States was bombing and strafing Vietnamese cities and villages, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Our bombings were terrorist acts on a huge scale.

The silver-haired old gent beside you now, the one who picked you to be his running mate in the presidential campaign, was one of those people who flew fighter-bomber planes over Vietnamese cities and killed innocent people in their own country. To them, such pilots were genuine terrorists.

“Americans are hurting right now, and they're angry. They're hurting, and they're angry. They're innocent victims of greed and excess on Wall Street and as well as Washington, D.C. And they're angry, and they have every reason to be angry.” -- John McCain, Oct. 15, 2008

Writing in this space at the beginning of the presidential campaign -- what feels like a hundred years ago -- I suggested that this year’s election cycle was shaping up to be “a season in hell.” Today, with two weeks to go before Election Day, that assessment seems quaint.

Attacking an opponent’s character is, of course, nothing new to American political campaigns. Character assassination and smear campaigns have a long and storied history in U.S. electoral politics.

But, in recent weeks, as the McCain camp tries to gain some traction after the short-lived, post-convention bounce Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination gave to the Republican ticket, the campaign rhetoric has grown increasingly divisive, inflammatory and downright hostile.

Four years ago, President Bush outlined his vision for an “ownership society,” a society where, “if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”

This “ownership society” would be one in which the individual, not the community, increasingly took title to everything. Success, property and credit would flow to those who deserved them, and away from those who didn’t.

In doing so, Bush told us, our nation would be better. More fragmented. Less homogeneous. But more market-oriented, more dynamic, more equitable in allocating to those who won.

Don't look now, America. You've just been mooned by the masters of Creative Greed.

Wall Street has shown its ass again. Buns of Steal!

Now we have to pay for the show, as usual. But pay with what? We don't have anything left. All the commonweal is gone, sucked up by our coddled billionaires, siphoned off into the coffers of our oil-rich friend/enemies on the Arabian Peninsula and our own insatiable oil tycoons, and shoveled into the black hole of Bush's Iraqi Horror Picture Show.

With what are we supposed to pay for this glorious glimpse of gluteus?