She intrigues me because she embodies everything I, as a 1970’s feminist, hoped that women would be able to achieve: she nurses an infant as she governs a state.

But she has been roundly vilified by those who consider themselves liberals, as well as by members of the liberal press—and she has been supported by the right wing conservatives whom I have always disdained.

I find myself defending the Republican Party.

So I had to sit down finally and consider the question of whether or not I could actually cast a vote for McCain-Palin. And the answer is yes.

Here’s why: I am well and truly tired of partisanship.

The legacy of the Clinton and Bush administrations is a broken relationship between Congress and the White House. It’s the most important relationship in America and nobody seems to be able to fix it.

I am worried about the economic health of this country. Congress allowed Bush to burn through the biggest surplus in history to create the biggest deficit in history. Neither branch of government was able to rise above self-interest long enough to take a hard look at the budget and now we’ve mortgaged our future.

We need a President who can reach across Pennsylvania Avenue and reach across the aisle in Congress…someone who has proven him or herself capable of forging compromises between opposing parties, someone who can generate discussion (unlike House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi who shut off the lights in Congress and then asked demonstrators if she could “drill their heads).

Both Joe Biden and Tom Daschle have gone on record as saying that John McCain would make a good Democrat—that’s how good his record is. He has brokered agreements between Republicans and Democrats in Congress and gotten behind campaign financing. He is a respected—and proven—leader, respected by both parties.

Now, I don’t agree with him on the war in Iraq. But the Democratic Party asked me to vote for John Kerry, who supported the war in Iraq and the Democratic-controlled Congress has voted over and over not only to authorize this war, but also to keep funding it. So, where’s the difference between the Dems and McCain there?

McCain is against a woman’s right to chose. Yet the Democratic Party asked me to vote for Bob Casey, who is one of the most vehement anti-choice politicians around. And he’s not the only anti-choice Democrat in Congress to feel that way. So where’s the difference between McCain and the Dems there?

And on the subject of women…McCain is married to a woman who is the CEO of a major company and who has also managed to effectively single-parent her kids in Arizona while he has lived in Washington. For his running mate McCain has chosen a young, working mother who also happens to be a rising politician. The Democrats? They ignored the results of 18 million votes for an extremely well qualified woman and chose a man—and then elevated his stay-at-home-wife to Jackie Kennedy status, extolling her virtues and her attire. There’s a big difference between the Dems and McCain there.

Someone once said that is a man is not a socialist at the age of 20 he has no heart; if he is still a socialist at the age of 40, he has no head. Well, I’m 50 now. I’m finally past the partisanship and ideological slogans.

I want an adult in office who has demonstrated that he or she is truly capable of leading, and not just talking about it. Yeah, he won’t stand with me on some issues that are very important to me personally, but I need to rise above the personal at this point and look to what’s best for the country as a whole. And I believe that choice will eventually, probably, lead me to McCain.

Jane Becker

http://thedamedomain.blogspot.com

When the boys were younger we used to call this Sunday afternoon, and one of the activities included me teaching them to watch NFL games so I could have a few hours to read the Sunday paper.  Of course that activity came back to bite me in the ass big time after they decided to actually play football and not just watch it. 

These days we tend to bond over bike rides, something we all enjoy doing.  I suspect Wally and the Snapper enjoy it most as riding precludes any serious conversation because they’re faster than I am.  But I’m still smarter so I decided to throw the bikes in the car and actually drive to a location so we could have some downtime in the car. 

The Snapper called shotgun, which is teen male speak for the front passenger seat.  As he climbed in he informed me he had to be back by 5 pm as he had plans.  I asked what her name was and he clammed up. Not one to pass up on bonding, I drilled down further and asked, “Does she play any sports?” and Wally said yes, she’d taken home the gold in the texting Olympics.   

I made a mental note to actually read my cell phone bill. 

We unloaded the bikes and I asked where their helmets were.  Wally said, “We don’t need helmets, we don’t play games” which is teen male speak for…I don’t know what.  If I did, it wouldn’t be code. 

We hit the path along the river.  At least, I think it was the river.  We pedaled so fast I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road long enough to check.  I managed to keep up with them for several miles by successfully drafting them but around mile four they opened up a significant lead and by the fifth mile they were way ahead of me. 

They didn’t look back. 

I charged along in the 85 degree weather and wondered if they’d come back for me if I keeled over of heat stroke. 

They disappeared from view. 

I thought, so much for family bonding.  I contemplated pulling over and sending them a text asking to drop me a postcard when they arrived.  

Instead I slowed down and thought about the fact that I had brought them to this path when they were babies and still in a bike carrier.  Later I taught them to ride their 2-wheelers along the flat stretches.  We took a lot of rides along this drive over the years and I can still remember the first time we raced and Wally beat me, sailing past me with a huge grin on his middle-school face. 

About a mile later I decided to cheat and take a short cut, but they still beat me back to the car.  As I panted up the Snapper said, “How’s that dust taste?”, the kind of teen male speak that could have gotten him in trouble if I could have caught my breath.   

I sprang for lunch from the old vendor and we sat in the shade and watched the roller skate dancers wheel around in free form performances.  Wally said, “Mom, you’re getting old.  You can’t keep up with us” and I said, “Well, yeah, I’m 50 and you guys are 18 and 17, I think that’s supposed to happen”.  Wally grabbed a piece of paper and sketched out an algebraic equation, trying to determine at what point I was most older than they were.  I said, “When you were born.  But I’m feeling most older now.” 

We sat there guzzling Gatorade and while I waited for my body temperature to return to normal I thought, well, this is the next phase of parenting, the one where they really do take off and leave me behind in the dust.  And I thought back to when I was in my 20’s and had innocently contemplated parenting as some sort of ambling bike tour through a beautiful countryside, one where I would lead my young charges along the path, instructing them along the way—and they of course would dutifully follow. 

Uh-huh. 

I looked at my tall, sweaty, healthy and happy sons, one about to take off on his own path and realized that parenting is never the trip you think it’s going to be. 

Which is mom speak for  I sure as hell have enjoyed the ride. 

I said, “I have to be honest, I’m not sure I’m ready for this” and he said, “Mom, this is the moment the world has been waiting for.”  

 Uh-huh. 

The Snapper said, “Really, everyone’s waiting for me to pass this test so I can drive them around.”  I said, “Isn’t it a little presumptuous to be making those plans before you’ve passed the test?” and he said, “Mom, you obviously didn’t follow Obama’s European tour.” 

And here I thought the only tour he was watching last week was The Tour De France. 

I said, “I was trying not to follow his semester abroad, actually.”  Wally jumped in.  He said, “It was kind of a waste because Obama didn’t get to meet Carla Bruni.  I said, “Well, he got to meet Sarcozy” and the Snapper said, “That’s like watching a football game without the cheerleaders.” 

Wally said, “Since we’re talking about  semesters abroad, I’d like to sign up for a semester in Germany.”   I said, “That’s great! Are you adding a double major in languages?” and Wally looked at me disdainfully.  He said, ”No, I’m running for President.” 

The Snapper high-fived him. I said, “Honey, I believe you can be anything you set your mind to, but you need a little more experience under your belt than a government major and a semester in Europe.”  Wally said, “Mom, that’s such a 20th century approach to government.”   

I said, “Experience is so over you mean?” and he and the Snapper nodded. I said, “Okay, well, I’ve traveled a lot, can I run for president?” and Wally said, “You can try, but you are a woman, and you know how the last one turned out.”  I said I unfortunately did. He added, “Plus, you don’t have a page on Facebook.”  

A disqualifier if I ever heard one.   

Wally pointed out that without Facebook, I wouldn’t be able to raise enough money to run for office.  I said, “You mean, raise enough to circumvent public financing?” and he said, “Whatever.” 

I said, “Let’s get back to the driving test for a minute.  I don’t understand the rush—why not get a little more time under your belt?”   The Snapper said, “My friends are texting me all the time, asking me to go for it.  It’s way beyond just me at this point.  I’ve become a symbol Mom.”   

“Of what?” I asked.

 “Of the possibility of teens having some freedom.  I am the one they’ve all been waiting for, trust me, I know.”   

I said, “You know what? Your friends don’t get to vote on this.  I do. And until I say yes, you don’t get to be the presumptive chauffeur for your friends.” 

He stormed out of the room, followed by Wally.  George passed them on the way in.  I said, “We have to disconnect the FIOS for awhile.” George was okay with that as the British Open is over, but he wanted to know why.  I said, “Because they’re watching all Obama all the time on the news and it’s having a bad impact on their behavior.”   

George said, “Don’t worry.  Reality will hit in the fall.”  I said, “You mean when they return to school?” and he said, “No, when the general election gets going.”   

George is like a heat seeking missile when he food shops.  You just need to get out of his way and let him find the target.

We filled the cart with hamburger meat and hot dogs, paper plates and red plastic cups.  I said to George, “There will be a lot of teenagers there, maybe we should buy clear cups so we can at least see whether or not they’re hitting up the booze table” but George seemed to think the discount on the red cups would make up for any price we might pay for the underage drinking.

We were three-quarters of the way through the store when I discovered we had forgotten to stock up on toilet paper, which was back in the first aisle.  I hiked the twenty yards to paper products, and then hiked pack, hefting a huge pack of Scott tissues on my shoulders.  As I walked back, I looked at George standing next to the cart, contemplating an institutional size bag of potato chips and started to laugh.  He asked what was so funny. I said, “Eight years ago when we first met, we spent our all of our free time in bed having sex.  Now we’re at Costco’s buying 30 rolls of toilet paper!” 

Somehow Costco and toilet paper never come up in songs dealing with the circle of life.

That circle is spinning pretty quickly these days.  I remember my own high school graduation, thirty-two years ago.  One of the songs we sang was “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell.  I loved that song and memorized all the lyrics correctly – an amazing accomplishment for someone who still misinterprets the lyrics to that song “Dizzy”, from the 1960’s  (I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning.  In my version, the next line always went, like a whirlpool lives in my head.  George gets cross when I still sing it like this, but I think it’s a viable alternative, especially at this point in my life).

Anyway, I memorized the lyrics to “The Circle Game” correctly and I used to sing it to Wally and the Snapper in those days when I still sang them to sleep at night.  For the most part we were all interested in the stanzas about the young boy who caught a dragonfly inside a jar. Or the stanza about the child for whom words like when you’re older must appease him.  We were all at the beginning of that song then.

Now the circle game has come around again, and we’re at the stanzas where the cartwheels have turned to car wheels and where Mitchell advises us to take your time, it won’t be long now, before you drag your feet to slow the circle down.  I’ve been watching Wally and his friends gather this past week, happily killing time between the end of class and the graduation ceremony.  They sleep late and dawdle through the day, endlessly hanging out, unconsciously dragging  their  feet.  At the same time they talk about how they’ll say good-bye when they have to leave for college at the end of summer. They yearn for a future they’re sure is so bright.  They dream of all the things they’ll do in that future while all of the parents try to pin them down so we can keep them in an eternal present—because we know how precious this summer is, between high school and college.  Hot summer nights, driving nowhere with the windows down and the radio on.  Barefoot, in love and surrounded by buddies.  Who doesn’t remember that summer?  And because we do, we want them to be happy in the moment because we know dreams don’t always turn out  as planned, as Joni sings in the final stanza. 

We know that someday, instead of having wild, new relationship sex they too will end up buying toilet paper in bulk at Costco.

George struggled to find a place to fit the oversized package in the cart.  He said, “If anyone had told me, eight years ago, that any of this—kids, football games, graduations, college visits—would have happened to me, I would have said they were nuts.”   Then he paused.  “But it’s been fun. You kind of get to go back and experience it all over again, only this time you have perspective.”  I said, “You only say that because you were out of the country when the Snapper drove through the front door of that store.” 

George laughed.  He said, “It makes me wonder if they’ll feel this way when they’re our age.”  I said, “Probably not.  They’ll be too busy running to Costco’s.”   George rammed his cart into the aisle, ahead of another father whose cart was also weighted down with party supplies.  He said, “You think?”  And I said, “I’m positive.  We’re captive on the carousel of time honey, and there’s no getting off.”  And George said, “That’s okay.  It’s a pretty good ride.”

I said, “I mean it. He called a female reporter in Michigan sweetie, he called another woman sweetie in Allentown last month and someone on his security detail is sending around sexually explicit jokes. And the media has already compared Michelle Obama to Jackie Kennedy, with all those retro 1960’s shifts she wears.”

“Interesting analogies, especially the shifts” said Rebecca. “So, who’s his Sam Giancana? Who’s his Bobby?” and I said, “Easy – John Edwards is Bobby and the Reverend Wright is his Giancana – useful to him when he was climbing the ladder, but embarrassing once he hits the top.”

She said, “Okay, I buy that. What’s his Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis?” I said, “Normally you would have to wait until taking office to make those kind of gaffes, but Obama’s been making misstatements about Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran before he even gets the nomination. I can only imagine what would happen if he actually takes office – the world is his oyster as far as screw-ups are concerned!” and Rebecca said, “Well, he’s good at apologizing, maybe that will help with damage control” and I said she might want to practice hiding under her desk, now.

She said, “Well, maybe you’re right. His mom’s name was Dunham and that’s an Irish name. So maybe he really is the new Jack Kennedy.” She was quiet a moment and then asked, “So who’s his Marilyn gonna be?” I said, “Probably Halle Berry. Have you seen her since the birth of her baby? Nursing is much more effective than lavender.”

Rebecca said, “I can sort of understand sleeping with Michelle O – she does have a certain sense of style, even though I prefer Hillary’s pantsuits. But, I can’t see myself sleeping with Obama. I don’t see anything sexy about him, do you?” and I said, “No. He’s too skinny for me. Plus, I have a rule about never sleeping with men whose thighs are thinner than mine.” Rebecca was still thinking about Michelle. She said, “Do you think she might be gay?” and I said, “Keep hoping, honey”. Rebecca sighed. I said, “On the plus side, if she is she can still get married in California.”

“The media might find that kind of hip you know”, Rebecca continued. I said the media found everything about the Obama’s to be hip and perfect – and they share that opinion nightly. I said, “I thought the role of the media was to not have an opinion. “You know”, I said, “Less Sunday Op-Ed and more Dragnet – just the facts”. Rebecca said, “In your dreams”.

Rebecca said, “If you go looking for too many facts you won’t be able to unify the party behind Barack and all the party elders are saying we have to unify – McGovern, Kennedy, Kerry, they’re all saying it”. I said, “Oh, yeah, those guys did a great job themselves of unifying people behind them to lose their own bids for the presidency. Just the people I really want to listen to”, and Rebecca said I was obviously a racist.

I sat up. I said, “How’s that?” and she explained that voters who support Hillary are racist because they won’t vote for a black candidate. I said, “But he’s also a white candidate! His mother was white and he was raised by his white grandparents! So how does not voting for a half-white man make me a racist?!” She said, “I’m just telling you what the media says” and I said no wonder voters weren’t listening to the media.

She said, “Well, I have something to confess - I’ve started watching Fox.” I was astounded. I said, “Rebecca, you’re a gay, Jewish Democrat! What are you doing watching Fox?” And she said, “Hey, at least Karl Rove never calls anyone sweetie!”

One of my own biggest gaffes was the time, as a student in France, I was given an assignment to translate a story from Time Magazine for homework. The article was about kissing customs – which cultures kiss, which prefer handshakes, whether those that kiss do so in airports or in private and how many times on each cheek.

Instead of working on the assignment I was reading Cyrano de Bergerac, a play written in 19th century French. People also talk a lot about kissing in Cyrano, so when the time came to hand in the assignment, I just used the vocabulary I’d picked up from the play. The only problem was that the verb for “to kiss” in the 19th century was “baiser”. In the 20th century that verb had come to mean **cking. So I had brilliantly translated the Time story into a treatise on **cking customs of different cultures – which ones **cked in airports, which ones did not **ck at all, and which ones **cked several times. On each cheek.

It was actually very funny, but I obviously failed the assignment and it did teach me to always double-check the meaning of my words when translating or speaking.

It’s a lesson that Senator Obama could learn.

For the nth time in this campaign, Obama has made a huge translation error. He spoke about bitter people in Pennsylvania turning to guns, God and antipathy. Then he said he misspoke: http://weblogs.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/obamas_bitter_taste_of_own_wor.html .

Obama plagiarized speeches from Deval Patrick and the movie script of “Malcom X” . Then he said oops, he should have attributed those words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilx3R9r7Soo&feature=related.

Obama took a pledge a year ago to limit his spending cap by taking public funds during the general election and is now refusing to re-affirm that promise: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/politics/15finance.html?ei=5070&en=492c3dbfed53df15&ex=1203742800&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1203091006-ML9n5OvAt4/Nnrnhw2hgow.

Obama said he doesn’t take money from PAC’s but he has taken money from employees of federal lobbying firms, from family members of the same and also from State Lobbyists: (http://www.capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=332).

Obama said he was never in the pews when Reverend Wright made his damning statements – and then said you cannot walk out on your minister any more than you can walk out on your family: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/18/obama.transcript .

Obama said that he came out against the war in Iraq in his famous speech in Chicago, but he never came right out and said “I am opposed to the war in Iraq”. He said he was opposed to dumb wars but he also said he thought the world would be a better place without Saddam Hussein: http://usliberals.about.com/od/extraordinaryspeeches/a/Obama2002War.htm .

Obama said he doesn’t take money from the energy companies but he has accepted more than $200,000 from people who work in the oil industry and two of his top campaign people are oil execs: http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obamas_oil_spill.html .

Obama said he didn’t know Rezco all that well – until Rezco’s indictment revealed otherwise: http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/757340,CST-NWS-watchdog24.article .

Obama said he is for changing the way business is done in Washington but his political action group, HOPE, has given close to $700,000 to various super delegates, including 34 who have declared for him. (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/wooing-with-charm-and-pacs/?ex=1203742800&en=0b70cc6e82437d8a&ei=5070&emc=eta1).

Obama said words are important, but he seems to be speaking another language. And to paraphrase Cyrano, we’re the ones getting….”kissed”.