Jitters

I remember 2004 with horrifying clarity -- the knot in my stomach during the debates, the depressing aftermath of election day, the week-long peppermint bark binge.

November, 2004 taught me to pay attention to the half of this country that doesn't think the way I do, and to respect the power of their dissent. That month, and for quite a while later, I listened carefully for whispers of just what, exactly, a second Bush Administration would mean, and mostly, what I heard made me sick.

Growing up in the last quarter of the 20th century, there was no shortage of young adult fiction to illustrate all the worst mistakes in our nation's history. I grew up reading about the idiotic death toll at Gettysburg, the senseless cruelty of the Japanese-American internment camps, the insistent refusal to see the truth behind Hitler's propaganda, and thinking: God, the shame of living through that time, of knowing that was going on and not being able to stop it.

Now, thanks to the miracle of the Guantanamo detainees, I now have some of that shame for my very own. My nephews, and perhaps my own children, can now ask me in years to come why my country did this horrific thing and why I did not try to stop it, and I will have exactly no answer. Well, other than: I was afraid of never being able to board a domestic or international flight without a full-cavity search.

Thank you, President George W. Bush, for making me a party to this utter fiasco and for illustrating, with greater clarity than I could have ever desired, the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton when he wrote "My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

So, there's that.

Then, happily, there is Barack Obama. Sweet holy mother of all that is good, there is Barack Obama.

As it happens, I was living in Chicago when the state senator made his run for the Senate in 2004. I went to a fund raiser for him at the Chicago Historical Society, heard him speak and shook his hand. From that moment to this, I've known he was an extraordinarily gifted leader, and I've been more than a little afraid that we'd never be smart enough to let him rise to the limits of his abilities.

I won't even pretend that I have some rational defense for this position. Much has been made of how some Americans vote for the guy with whom they'd like to have a beer. You may take from my use of the phrase "with whom they'd like to have a beer" that my decision metrics are a little different.

I want to vote for a guy who could pick up the phone and through sheer implacable reason and legal wit, bully my insurance company into covering my migraines. I want to vote for a guy who can talk for ten minutes about the balance of power and religion in Iran without once mispronouncing a name or forgetting any of the major players. I want to vote for a guy who, if he showed up in a movie, you'd bristle in disbelief and think, "Nobody's that smart." I want to vote for a guy who makes President Bartlett seem like kind of a schmuck.

I want to vote for a guy who would do his job the way I do mine. If we need to send flowers to a funeral home in South Bend, IN, I do not call 800-Flowers. I do not go to FTD.com. No. I hunt through Notre Dame alumni websites until I find the nicest hotel in town, then call their concierge to recommend a florist. And that's the kind of President I want -- the kind who will do whatever it takes to do his job to the best of his abilities.

I would vote for that guy if his name were Theodore Roosevelt. I would vote for him if he were Dwight Eisenhower. I swear to god, I would vote for him if he were Gerald Ford. But the fact that he happens to be a Harvard-educated, former University of Chicago law professor with a Kenyan dad and a single mom and a grandmother who just died of cancer?

Done.

Oh, and at the same time I get to vote to re-affirm the right for gay couples to marry? Don't mind if I do.

So now all that remains is for me to sit here on the far left edge of the country, waiting for polls to close and states to flick over from white to red or white to blue, and see what happens. It's almost more than I can bear. I can't wait.

And yet I'm so terribly afraid that the waiting is going to be the best part of this or any year for many years to come.

Or... uh, not.