Dave Alpert: I Know Where You’re Going with That

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are duking it out for the Democratic nomination.  I don’t know how much this interests me.  No matter who gets the nod, that’s my president.  It’s not that I don’t have a preference.  I was impressed with Hillary when she was fighting for universal healthcare under her husband’s administration.  And I know her to be a smart and talented woman.  Many of my friends, however, support Obama–particulary my younger friends.  And it makes sense.

Obama projects a young and exciting and hopeful energy.  He is considered the candidate of hope.  While it bums me out that Clinton makes fun of that, I understand that idea of a candidate that people want to believe in.  Here’s the way I see it.  They are virtully identical–what they care about, what is the Democratic ideology that I stand behind.  There are minute differences.  Obama has the privilege of boasting he wouldn’t have sent soldiers to Iraq–a move I personally was entirely against.  Clinton had to make a hard decision during a time when Bush’s administration was feeding Congress a watershed of misinformation and applying unfair pressure.

For those of us over 30, we remember a president Bill Clinton that was also a candidate of hope, and led the country through 8 of the most hopeful years since JFK was sworn in.  Hillary participated not only as a first lady, but as an agent of Democratic change.  So, many of us that remember lean towards Clinton, while others without those memories cling to Obama’s charismatic speeches and slogans.  Personally, no one can convince me that it matters.  They are entirely the same.  And either way, I win.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.