What I will tell my children

Our little family waited in line for 45 minutes on Election Day morning to vote. The line snaked out the door of the elementary school that serves as our polling place and wound down the sidewalk and into the parking lot.

Forty-five minutes in line with two toddlers is usually something you'd only put up with at Disney World, but there was no way I was missing my chance to vote.

Growing up, my Dad always took me into the booth with him, and I remember when he'd pull the lever and close the curtain that it felt like I was being let in on some kind of grown-up secret. Never mind that I had little concept of what he was actually doing, I knew it was "something important."

And so it was with some degree of pride and nostalgia that I stood at the little table (no curtains for us, just tall cardboard blinders) with Samson in my arms to cast my vote. We had ample time to discuss what was going to happen as we waited, and I did my best to inform him of what voting entails. When we got inside, he was ready and suggested, since I told him my job was to pick one of two names, that I pick the one named Samson.

Alas, I could not. But I was excited to vote in a way I had not ever been before. For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I was voting for someone and not as a hedge against the other guy.

I'll be honest, I'm kind of an apostate Democrat, sort of a liberal Libertarian if that makes any sense. Was never a Clinton fan [see pot smoking, dissembling; see also genocide, Rwanda; see also Defense of Marriage Act], and I couldn't suspend disbelief long enough to buy the cowboy act from a guy who went from boarding school to the Ivy League. Even so, I don't remember ever feeling joy at either man's failures. After all, their failures quickly became ours.

And while I would love it if this country had a viable third party, at this point I'd settle for two that actually functioned properly.

In my lifetime it feels like politics has become a reductive extenstion of sports. Basically, the called third strike is only outrageous when it's your guy at the plate. Which is not only intellectually disingenuous, but it makes talking to any true partisan (left or right) both futile and vaguely embarassing.

Look, I'm not a particularly starry-eyed individual. If I could get my own personal theme song, it would be Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows." And I certainly know better than to expect that on January 20, 2009 the country will magically change to a nation free of troubles and absent of divisions. But I am hopeful that in a nation and a world facing a distinct crisis of leadership, we have elected someone who can rally the better angels in our nature and help deliver on the promise of what America is supposed to be about.

What I will tell my children is that on Election Day 2008, their mother and I took them with us to the polling station at eight in the morning. That there, with them in our arms, we voted for Barack Obama --- not with an eye toward "making history" or in order that we might congratulate ourselves on our "progressiveness," but with an eye toward their future and toward the kind of country we want them to grow up in.

I expect this last part holds true for those friends of mine who voted for McCain as well. I am hopeful that with a campaign that was both nasty and brutish (but sadly not short) behind us, we can get past bumper sticker philosophy (from the left and the right; seriously, Bush is not Hitler; and even if you didn't vote for him, Obama is your president) and do something. We seem to be awash in slogans. Solutions? Not so much.

With this, I will get off my soap box. I've got laundry to do.