There's an open thread on BlogHer today for the South Carolina Democratic primary. I think people must be out and about because no one has commented yet. I just checked the Post election blog for an update and there's not too much out there yet, aside from reports that early turnout in most precincts is well above average compared to 2004.
I think this is good. Turnout and participation in the democratic process is a good thing. But as I sit here in Maryland, a 37-year old female registered Democrat who won't get MY turn to cast a vote until a whole week AFTER Super Tuesday, an eternity away on February 12, I feel little but inadequate because I seem to have such trouble articulating anything that I think might shed light on this situation. I feel overwhelmed by the thousands of impassioned, articulate words I've read from people I know well and don't know at all, from people I respect so much I am grateful to call them friends and colleagues to people I just caught in passing, from people who think Barack Obama is the best thing to come down the line ever to people who think he's a changy changerson mess of generalizations and nothing more, from people who think Hillary Clinton is a she-devil (whatever that is) to people who think she's leading us (whoever "us" is) to the promised land (wherever "that" is.)
Every day, I read news stories. I read comment chains, some comments as bigoted and ugly as I've ever read, some from black men and women supporting Clinton, some from white men and women supporting Obama, many indignant at the judgment that they'd support ANYONE based on race and/or gender. My head, it swims.
It's January, almost a year before the actual election, and I'm already news- and blog-saturated, unsure and a little bit worried too, because I can't comprehend any of the nominees from the Republican side and in my worst nightmare that person, whoever HE is (at least we've got that gender box checked off over there, whew) will be the next President.
I wish I had conviction. I've identified myself as a Clinton voter, but I wish I could be a t-shirt wearing, card-carrying supporter of any one individual. I can't be and I'm not. Color. Gender. Religion. Campaign-finance-whatever-they-are. I don't know them, not really. As interested in and educated about politics as I make it my business to be, I have very little trust in politicians themselves or in what any of the candidates lay out as the major reason they should be elected. How can you believe? How can you see past the lobs of "he voted present" and "her husband is a sucky, pushy ex-President" and "I'm just the nice guy in all of this" to something that makes any kind of sense? I can't, and if you can please clue me in. I think that politics has become such a quagmire and media horror show that it would take a truly insane or ego-driven person to want to subject him or herself and their family and closest friends to that kind of scrutiny. Or maybe, in some dreamscape version of all of this, these people really DO have a sky-high sense of public service, really DO believe that what they bring to the table is essential for the future success of the United States.
If that's the case, I wish I felt it. I mean, I know I've felt the soul and wallet-sucking opposite over these past eight years. You'd think I'd know, as a fairly intuitive sort if I say so myself, what the real deal is. And maybe what worries me is that I think I WOULD know it if I saw it, and I just haven't, and don't really believe that I will.
Or maybe she just ruined me by picking that stupid Celine Dion song. When it comes down to it, I'm just an id-driven human being with a fallible frontal lobe, I guess. I mean, I actually watched an episode of the Real Housewives of Orange County today. How can you trust me?
Seriously, even when Professor Kim and I sat down with Dennis Kucinich and his wife for the interview at Howard University last summer, I was looking for it. When I was watching Bill Richardson sweat under the hot, hot lights in the spin room and he just looked pissed off, I was looking for it. When I was watching Cornel West spin (again that word) for Barack Obama, I was looking for it. 
Even when I was watching Mike Gravel, bless his heart, pound away about the old news that was "the war on drugs!!!!!" to young black reporters, and telling them that THEIR press had done them wrong, I was looking for it. (Talk about not finding it, for real.) 
When Barack Obama came on the scene, I wanted to support him and was excited to hear him speak. Partially, yes, I'll admit that it was because he was not a white man (that is to say, he was not what we had had, he did not represent what had so depressed me for so long, he represented progress for equality that would reflect well on us all), he was a new face and voice and I wanted to see someone who would lift us up out of the dregs we've fallen into over the past eight years. I listened to him. I've seen him in a few debates. I saw him address a Planned Parenthood convention. I was left unenthralled, and disappointed. Whatever I was hoping to hear, or hoping to intuitively sense, I didn't.
By the way, I've also considered all candidates in the harsh light of who they'd be replacing. George W. Bush ultimately didn't get elected completely on his machine's own merits and efforts. As corrupt as I believe it was, it wasn't all that. People really did vote for him. And as much as I respect the rights of my fellow citizens to vote how they see fit, I find this unimaginable. Just absolutely horrifying and unimaginable. And whether this paints me as uneducated or short-sighted, when it comes down to an alternative, I'd ultimately be satisfied with either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I'd be thrilled with John Edwards. But notice that I say "as an alternative," and I find this disturbing.
I can understand why some people - black and white, male and female, anyone in the country of any sort- like Obama and want to see HIM in the Oval Office. I cannot say for them - although many will say for themselves, vehemently that it is not - whether this is because he's black. Because he's a man? Because he's a snappy dresser who speaks so articulately? Because he has a vision? Because of some or all or none of these reasons, just because? I don't know. That's their call. If you make sweeping generalizations about anyone, you stand to lose and you stand to alienate, and you also are quite likely wrong on many, many counts.
I can understand why, also, SOME women would like to see a woman - a qualified, competent woman of integrity - in the Oval Office. I'd like to see that too. I don't care if it happens before or after a black man, or an Asian woman, or a Hispanic/Latino person, or whatever. I don't care. I do care that it happens. I do care that other people of other colors and genders and races and religions get a shot at leadership - IF those individuals have what it takes. For that matter, I'd take a white man who had something to bring to the table at this point. Like I said, if I had a feeling that Edwards was the guy, I'd say "great". I really don't, but that's another story. (Now Elizabeth? Elizabeth for President, baby. All the way.)
I decided that I would vote for Hillary Clinton during the first debate, prior to Iowa, I think. I may have decided last summer. I may have been programmed by coming of age in the first Clinton terms, when I really felt like things were better for us on the foreign policy front, when I felt like my President could find the countries he was visiting on a map. (and yes, I know Obama could do that, too.) I saw a person who had answers to questions that made sense to me. I saw someone who wasn't taking any crap off of anyone. I saw someone who was specific. I saw someone who - and this is where I'm told I'm wrong, and when it's proven I'll owe someone a bet payoff that has yet to be determined - could stabilize that which is currently so unstable on so many levels. I do not have that sense about Barack Obama. I just don't, and I can't explain it any more deeply than that.
As far as gender goes, I do see Hillary Clinton get slammed for things that men do, routinely, in campaigns and for which they get passes. I see her stand up for herself and get criticized. I see her criticize her opponents (because that is what you DO in a competition like this. This is not a tea party. John Kerry much?) and get criticized for that, more than they get criticized for criticizing her (Isn't this fun?). I see her called names, slurs related to sexual orientation, even, which make me ill and I wonder what it would ever take to turn that tide.
Like I said, I don't know if I'm right about her being the best option to lead, which bothers me to no end. I just want to see something different. I want to see something better. I want to see a country where we don't ignore the concerns of not just the poor, which is Edwards's primary message, but of the struggling middle class, increasingly made up of educated, single, broke people, both men and women of a variety of races and ethnicities, of which I am a part. I want to see something I'm afraid I'll never see. I want to see someone capable of extricating us from Iraq in a way that makes sense, which I do believe is possible, but one of the most difficult situations we've potentially ever been in, I'll even venture to say beyond Vietnam, because the world stage was set quite differently then and the nuclear threat was different. I want to see someone who won't alter the Constitution to define American family life, which has about a million different configurations and can no longer be bound by paper and law. I want something good, for the remaining years I've got.
I'm okay with this discussion on race and gender that we're having, and in fact I welcome it, because I think it's important. I also don't know why the fact that there is racial conflict - in South Carolina, no less- is such a shock, and I really don't think it is to any fairly self-aware person, beyond the MSM's manufacture of "shock". Spent any time down there? I have. Progressive pockets may indeed exist but the roots of segregation and racism run deep and insidiously, and I daresay (because it's not my home, just a beautiful place I take advantage of for its beaches and lowcountry spirit) it will take generations of change to set this right. It's the only place I've ever seen a black man sneered at and called "boy" by his white supervisor, not so many years ago, in a restaurant, for some slip-up that meant nothing. I felt it stab me right in my stomach, where painful words always go. I know - a one-shot deal, what do I know? But I know I saw it, I remember the faces and the paint color on the walls, and I know I've never forgotten it.
I know, also, because I see it at home, in a state where they laugh at us if we call ourselves "southern". Where I live, just outside of the nation's capital, there are new immigrant communities in the cities and the suburbs, even out to what they call the "exurbs" (yuck) and if you think the seeds of dissension and racial strife are not sown anew here as people must share space and turf, where bodegas are popping up on old stretches of farmland, where schools require ESOL programs and basic literacy for native speakers alike, I'll send you some news stories and we'll chat. This country's origin as an intentional melting pot has shifted and changed, spun and re-melted, in fact spins and re-melts right this very second, and here we sit in 2008, old, ignored wounds left to scar over, until - surprise - we have to discuss them. We have to fund the programs. We have to open the doors to our churches. We have to take the nativity scene down from in front of the government building. We have to speak - and hear - the language. Or not.
If this endless election season means anything, it's that finally topics are being discussed outright that are normally reserved for living rooms and quiet lunches with friends who we either know share our views so there's no challenge there, or who represent a culture or gender or whatever else different from ours that we care enough to push the boundaries of our comfort zones and discuss. They are awkward. They speak to our worst fears and our personal identities, our fairy tales about our communities and our country. They might make us feel guilty for what we've got or blinded by anger at what we don't. Good. Wake up. Talk about it. Sit squarely, preface it with "I don't know how you feel, but..." or "This is difficult for me to say," or "Correct me if I'm wrong." It won't kill you. Might even make you stronger.
A woman I know fairly well said the other night that she couldn't "see a female president." She couldn't SEE A FEMALE PRESIDENT. She couldn't SEE a woman making decisions of extreme national interest, including whether or not to go to war, or to vote a bill into law, or perhaps even deciding what shoes to wear. And she couldn't see this because she didn't think she'd be tough enough to do that, because she was a woman. She actually mentioned her menstrual cycle as a reason.
I had to sit down. I was completely shocked and considerably disappointed, and also reminded that I don't know, ever, what people are really thinking until they tell me. I told her she frightened me, because I know her well enough to say that. I also told her that I couldn't believe she was serious, and asked her if she'd read a newspaper over the past 20 years and noticed all the profound mistakes made by men AND women, all the wars waged by men for stupid reasons, who may or may not have been having a hormonal down day when they pulled the national trigger, and maybe should have slept on it and read the latest issue of GQ and downed some Haagen Daaz in the bathtub before they did anything so shit simple stupid as BREAK UP WITH A MIDDLE EASTERN LEADER, thereby ensuring the deaths of thousands of people in the process. The worst I've ever done in the throes of PMS is alienate a boyfriend or piss off my sister, then make an ill-advised hundred dollar purchase online.
There are as many battles to fight as we can create, unfortunately. And I think that this next one, this presidential race, is important on so many levels, as it creates an opportunity for someone to come in who will have a lot of cleaning up, and catching up, to do. The relative absence of the currently employed President in this whole thing is the most telling for me of what our current situation is. Where is he? No one seems to care. No mark has been left on national identity. There is no solidity in his leadership. The damage has been done. There is no torch to pass, which is clear from the disarray on the Republican side.
The South Carolina story is compelling because it reflects the disparity in experience for residents of the same state, the same country, a place where opportunity is supposed to be the same on every corner, but it's not. This has never been the case and no matter what political belief system we hold, or who we check off in the ballot box, it's something any person of conscience would do well to be reminded of now and again.
I - a 37 year old, white, student-loan buried, non-homeowning, female resident of an expensive coastal city - might vote for Hillary Clinton, but I support Barack Obama too, and I support his supporters, whatever their reasoning, as long as it is based in what they believe is right for them and for all of us. Either way it turns out, I'll get behind one of these people, and I'll cross my fingers and kiss them before I cross myself (my only collision of church and state, so whoever it is will get at least one lapsed-Catholic vote.) Because when it comes down to it, I support anyone who's trying to make a change, to move us past this ridiculous two-term trainwreck, to maybe give us something good to look forward to for the next four years. I hope they're not just saying it. I hope they mean it. I hope the politics of hope is everyone's politics on some level, and not just a buzz word. I hope it turns out - no matter how it turns out - for the better. And given how it's gone since 2000, I don't think that would just be wishing.
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