Doing My Part

Alright, Democrats. You didn’t make things easy for me with your votes on Super Tuesday. I was looking to you to make a clear choice in your states’ Democratic primaries so that some of the pressure would be off of me on Mediocre Saturday, when I will be participating in the Washington State caucus.

Usually, by this stage in the political game, there is already a front-runner, and my vote is nothing but symbolic. But this year, I feel like I really have a say. The only problem is that I don’t know what that say will be.

I am undecided. Really undecided. This is a new feeling for me. Part of the issue is that the two candidates on the buffet menu are both moderate Democrats who, more or less, propose similar ideas. But I also think that I’m struggling with something bigger, some larger question about what matters to me.

It occurred to me that, for the first time, I am no longer a “younger voter.” And I guess the issue is whether I am still able to feel like a younger voter and whether I want to. In the past, if a candidate said that he was going to have us all stand together on the top of a mountain and hold hands and find common ground across division, I would have followed him up the hill like he was the pied piper. But now, I hear the calls for UNITY! And CHANGE! and HOPE! and I think to myself, change doesn’t happen just by wishing it so.

Or does it?

Obama gives me the opportunity, if I’m willing to take it, to reconnect with a type of idealism that has been slippery and elusive. He is not the first to promise a new set of civic relationships, a new way of solving problems, a new world order of sorts that has capital J Justice at its core. He is not the first, but he delivers his message in a way that sounds so authentic, so real, so almost-there possible. I miss that feeling, and I am hungry for it. But I am also wary, because I know that we, as a country, have a crappy track record of translating good vibes into meaningful action.

It would feel right to jump on the sails of Obama idealism, but Hillary Clinton represents a different kind of idealism for me. I’ll be honest. It’s exciting to me that we could possibly have a left-leaning, competent, persuasive female president, even if we have to spend the next four years analyzing whether she’s too female or not female enough (Too many tears? Too few? Too much cleavage? Matronly pantsuits?). I read an essay by Rebecca Traister on Salon.com that has come the closest to expressing my feelings about the gender component of this election. She writes,

"…I think of how, when I was 9, my dad took me into the voting booth so that I could pull the lever for the first female vice president, and how he told me that he hoped that in my lifetime I would have the opportunity to vote for a woman at the top of the ticket. And I think about the fact that this is it -- my chance to pull that lever for her, so that I can do it again come November.

Who am I to turn up my nose at her because she's imperfect? I always figured the first female president would be a Thatcher-style Republican -- how can I complain about a Wellesley-educated Democrat who once resembled the second-wave women who fought for my ability to control my own reproduction and get paid as much as my male colleagues?

How could I ever tell those women that I voted for Barack Obama? What do I tell my aunt, my mother -- women who aren't crazy about Hillary's politics either, but whose extra decades on the planet have left them more acutely aware than I about the fleeting opportunity she presents. What if I have a daughter someday and she asks me about why we've never had a woman president? Do I tell her that we once came close, but that Mommy was really digging Obama that day?"

And so I struggle, but I sure am glad to feel the power of choosing again, to feel that a struggle is worth it. I have a sense that I will walk into the caucus site this Saturday still unclear about what I will do. Perhaps I will be one of those people who shifts position in the middle of the caucus! Wouldn’t that be fun?

Stay tuned. I’ll be doing a little filming this weekend as we make our way from the boys’ school pancake breakfast to the polling place. Live coverage of my indecision – it doesn’t get any better than that.