While I recognize his genius, both as a groundbreaking poet and one-man PR machine, I’ve never been much of a Whitmaniac. Even if it was just a literary device, his boundless grandiosity has always been something of a turnoff. And it wasn’t just a literary device—this was a man who described his own personality as “magnetic.” No doubt it was. But to say so himself doesn’t leave me that inclined to heed the dictum in the opening lines of Leaves of Grass: “And what I assume, you shall assume.”

Not so fast, Walt.

Yet in the wake of a CNN program in which Senators Clinton and Obama addressed The Compassion Forum at Messiah College to discuss matters of faith, nothing was more welcome or fitting the next night than a PBS “American Experience” special on Whitman.

The Messiah College website describes The Compassion Forum as “an unprecedented bipartisan presidential candidate forum dedicated to discussing pressing moral issues that bridge ideological divides within our nation.” But the next day’s New York Times put it more simply: “Obama and Clinton assure Christians that they share their values.”

I don’t know about you, but I find myself more annoyed than assured by this ongoing effort of the Democrats to prove their piety, and of a media-choked public all too willing to foist it upon them. (McCain, for his part, declined to participate; his conservative detractors notwithstanding, perhaps he assumes that as the presumptive Republican nominee his card-carrying Christianity speaks for itself. Or maybe he just couldn’t find a passage in the Gospels that supports his unequivocal support of a war riddled with lies.)

So it was with open arms that I received the PBS special the following night. To be fair, I had experienced a twinge of Whitmania one summer evening several years ago when I climbed into bed with the Library of America edition and opened to his Civil War poems. As these tend to play second or third fiddle to the epic Leaves of Grass at one end of his oeuvre, and lyric giants like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” at the other end, I had never fully encountered these more modest middle works in all their war-torn humility and nearly unbearable sympathy.

Not that Whitman had ever been short on sympathy, as the program duly pointed out. Whether witness to the tide of 2,000 new immigrants a day on the desperate streets of New York, or to the naked slave poked and prodded on an auction block in New Orleans, Whitman’s power of identification came with his personal mantra, “That could be me.”

Everywhere he went and everyone he saw, “That could be me.” Hence the scribbled line in his journal that unlocked the opening to Leaves of Grass: “I am the poet of the slaves and of the masters of slaves.”

Hearing that Whitman expected the country to be healed by his poetic vision before it tottered any closer to civil war, and then blamed the war on the failure of Leaves of Grass to sell more than twelve of the 700 copies he printed at his own expense, I found myself drawn to him in a way I hadn’t been before.

Grandiose or not, God bless the poet who thinks his or her first book will save a nation from imminent self-destruction. But repeat “That could be me” enough times with regards to the lot of others, and I guess you come to believe that anything is possible in your own lot, for good or ill.

Considering the recent blunders of Clinton and Obama alike, one wishes CNN and PBS had aired their programs on opposite nights. That way both contestants would have had the chance to rehearse this mantra of Whitman’s and help The Compassion Forum live up to its name by reminding themselves, with regards to the other, “That could be me.”

This, it seems to me, is the “password primeval” regardless of the meaning that Whitman intended with such a phrase, whether you’re the godfather of American poetry with no use for organized religion, or a presidential candidate touting your church attendance.