60 Days until Election Day

The two conventions, Democratic and Republican, are now over and there's just about 2 more months until Election Day. I came back from my year abroad (i.e., my year of not thinking about the U.S.) to witness the primaries going on in full swing. The back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was too much for me to take in while I was adjusting back to life in the U.S. If you'd just been to 12 countries in 7 months, would you then suddenly turn your full attention to what the rest of the country seemed to be listening to: the exchanges, some of it pretty bitter, between two politicians wanting to be their party's nominee for President? Would you even turn on any of the so-called news channels and thereby remind yourself that you're now back in a country that is so cut off in so many ways from the rest of the world, but ironically and depressingly enough, seems to affect just about every other country on the planet? From Germany to Japan, I had been hearing of people's disgust with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and of their hope, no, their need for things to change.

Yes, of course I was completely astounded by the historical nature of this primary race: a woman and an African American, both of them people I admired. But there was one deciding factor for me in choosing whom to support, and it was neither gender nor race: Hillary did not vote against the Iraq war when she had the chance to do so in 2003, and that to me was unforgivable. Yes, it was that post-9/11 time of being "either with us or against us", a time when patriotism meant not questioning the President. But if there was ever a time to show leadership, to say that the emperor had no clothes, it was then. In the ensuing 5 years, I saw her change into just another politician. Where was the woman who transformed (for my generation, at least) the role of the First Lady? Where was the woman who authored, "It Takes a Village"? In the meantime, completely independent of all that, I had been paying close attention to what was going on in my own state. I've been saying all through the primaries that if it hadn't been for the fact that Hillary Clinton had the great misfortune to be running against someone of Barack Obama's calibre, I would have ended up voting for her. Better her than some neo-con.

I live in Chicago, Illinois. Specifically, in the neighborhood called Hyde Park. No surprise: I'm an Obama supporter. Not because he happens to also call Hyde Park home, but because of what I've learned about him in the last 4-5 years. When he was running for the Senate in 2004, he piqued everyone's curiosity in Illinois. I'd never heard of him despite the fact that he was in the Illinois state senate (who knows who their state senators are?) and despite the fact that he wrote regular OpEd columns in our neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald (who subscribes to that if they're not looking for an apartment or a condominium)? Excuses, excuses, I know. But here was a black man running for the U.S. Senate who seemed to actually stand a chance. Who the hell was he? (Illinois did have the first black female senator in the country, Carol Moseley Braun, by the way). Then one day the New Yorker magazine arrived in the mail and in it there was an article about him. Aha. Interesting. Just when you start losing hope in this country, someone inspiring comes along. I hadn't quite hit 40 at the time, but I was fast approaching a certain impatience with things around me and I wasn't sure how much longer I could stand of it. If this man was appealing to even white farmers in southern Illinois (I used to live in Indiana and I know a little something about down-home intolerance and xenophobia), then perhaps we're beyond the no passing zone here. Perhaps the stars have re-aligned. Perhaps this half-Kenyan man, this sensible, educated, uprooted but so deeply-rooted son of the soil can do something for us.

Fast forward to the 2008 Democratic primaries and my various post-long-trip-return challenges and life changes: I decided, for my own sanity, to start paying attention to the presidential race only after the Democratic party nominee was selected. And so... here we are now.