After bitterly disappointing elections in 2000 and 2004, I took my leave of politics and decided I was no longer interested—if you'd asked me, I might have told you I was a registered cynic. This year's election, until recently, had largely failed to capture my attention. But as I watched the Iowa caucus results—and some caucuses themselves! How fascinating!!—I felt that political part of myself stirring again.
And after watching last night's primary results, I feel optimistic. What I'm feeling at this moment is the best of politics, that wave of emotion as the candidates remind you that we can make change, and we can make it together.
Let me say first that I honestly don’t know who I'll be voting for when my turn comes—not that it will matter much anyway. And in terms of this wave of optimism I’m feeling at the moment, it hardly matters. I will confess to having reservations about both Clinton and Obama—on the election quiz site Glassbooth.org, they only score about 80% similar to my beliefs (in case you’re curious, here's a shout out to Dennis Kucinich, who seems to match me most closely). But that said, the two of them tonight have captured my heart and my imagination.
To see Hillary Clinton win the New Hampshire primary—especially after she was predicted to lose by a double-digit margin, after the misogynist drivel thrown at her this week after her "emotional moment"—nearly brought me to tears. In my lifetime, this is the closest I've ever seen a woman come to becoming president of the United States. And as I watched her speech I forgot about everything else and just reveled in the possibility embodied in that moment.
And then there's Obama, who has embodied possibility from the moment he announced his candidacy—not just in his role as potentially the first African American president, but his entire campaign narrative is about possibility. Tonight’s speech was no different. With his “Yes we can” speech, again, I temporarily forgot about any differences on the issues and I was swept up in the idealism, the optimism, and, forgive the overplay of the word-of-the-week, but the idea of change.
This feeling may not last long, but for this moment when our political future looks bright, I say thanks to Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, and to the extraordinary turnout of voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.
