The Race

It's been so long since I've posted that Safari didn't autocomplete blogger.com for me.  My only excuse is that I've been updating my Facebook status with some regularity.

In the meantime I have been pretty engrossed in the election.  Never before has politics grabbed my attention and kept it for so long.  Why is that?  I think there are two reasons.

The first is that as I've gotten older, my interest in politics and news in general has risen.  I used to spend my time in the car listening to Howard Stern and Tom Leykis, now it is almost exclusively NPR.  Does the world in general just become more interesting as we age?

Secondly is that I haven't been all that happy about where our country has been going politically for quite some time.  I don't consider myself too closely aligned with either party, but I have strong political views.  Recently I'm getting more and more hopeful that the majority is coming to realize that fighting an effective war on terror doesn't mean toppling any regime we don't like without thoughtful planning, or that letting gay people enjoy the benefits of marriage doesn't diminish anyone else's relationship, or that from a scientific perspective, there is no dispute that humankind was shaped by evolution.

So as you might guess, the recent polling data is leading me to get my hopes up that November 4th is going to be a good day for me.  Becky and I are thinking of having some friends over that night.  I'm planning on being glued to the TV all night, but I think that it will be like a major sporting event where having others around pulling for the same team will make a victory all the more savory.

After watching these campaigns for almost two years now it's hard to believe that it will all be over in just 19 days.  One big reason to look forward to the getting the election behind us is that I think there is a lot of news being obscured by the race.  It has taken a complete meltdown of our financial system to steal the headlines from the candidates, though now that the bailout has passed the economy seems to be talked about more often as a factor in the race then as its own standalone issue.

It's almost time to stop worrying about who's going to be fixing this nation and start worrying about how he's actually going to fix it.