I Think I Can Vote for Barack Obama

Of course, talk is cheap, but I've found American politics goes faster when a wide variety of people acknowledge a problem and then compromise about a solution rather than impose a solution from above. For instance, nothing has been done about Social Security, because President Bush refused to discuss other options but individual accounts.

Obama has the same list of problems I do and so does John Edwards. I'll have to see whether Hillary Clinton does, too, but I have yet to see her in a debate speak with this kind of clarity. She spends much of her time on the attack and the defensive feint. This isn't exactly subtle political analysis.

If it comes to it, I could vote for John McCain. While I'm not sure if fiscal conservatism and strict constructionism are unmitigated goods, McCain's consistent application of them sets him apart from much of the rest of the Republican Party. I think leftists other than myself will appreciate someone who actually believes in states' rights. Not many Senators swing back and forth from highly conservative to highly liberal ratings unless they're horse traders or genuinely interested in the common good to the exclusion of ideology. Looking at McCain's legislative history, horse-trading never seemed up his alley. As a Senator from a Mexican border state, McCain chose a middle ground between the xenophobia many of his constituents often embrace and the ethnic feeling of some of his other constituents, angering many of the people who could make him the Republican nominee. That's courage even for a man who once observed in his mid 40s that the place where he had lived the longest was Hanoi, Vietnam. Despite the Vietcong's poor hospitality, McCain led the charge to normalize relations, angering many of his fellow Vietnam veterans.

McCain famously has said that he is now a Baptist, because their praxis was more emphatic about forgiveness than Episcopalianism. In the Republican field, you really have to appreciate a candidate whose Christianity is mainly indicated by his mercy and compassion because he knows how much he needs to be forgiven. Most immediately, he has foot in mouth disease of a rather insensitive order, joking about military action against Iran or buying Jon Stewart an IED in Baghdad. His common reply to criticism of these problem is "Get a life." But he is a man who's been on both sides of bombs and for McCain, like Vonnegut, war can be equally horrible and humorous. Indeed, what could be more attractive in the midst of our present national moral crisis regarding the limits of the war on terrorism than a President with firsthand experience of being on the receiving end of torture?

But ignoring his war service, McCain has other skeletons in his closet. When he was young and stupid, he was young and stupid. His misspent youth was not unlike our current President's, except I've yet to hear of a President dating an exotic dancer. Returning from Vietnam, his first marriage broke down for reasons that McCain admits had more to do with his inability to settle down at 40 than the relics of war in his soul. His present wife has struggled with drug addiction, though this hasn't stopped her from an active career in philantropy and running her family business as a beer distributor.

All of this and he's still viable. Amazing.

All right. Enough politics. I'm watching Northanger Abbey .


ESA(20080120.1)