John McCain - for whom I have enormous respect as a person - will leave a standing force in harm's way in Iraq for the forseeable future.  Our economic system has become too large and - for the common man and woman, which includes most members of Congress - too complicated to understand, much less regulate.  People - while espousing the noblest of goals - appear to be guided by an insatiable greed when those lofty goals come into conflict with their short term personal desires.  It's enough to make an old hippie give up recycling and sit out the coming general election.

I recycle aluminum, plastic, newspapers, whatever I can, always have.  I also hang onto things long beyond their usefulness and then part with them with great reluctance, being one of those people who comes to feel that even the lowliest household item has somehow become imbued with a personality.  So, the other night when I threw everything in sight out in one big pile of garbage, none into the recycling bins I knew some sinister force was at work.  While I am now back on course, my little binge of trashiness bespeaks a larger inner battle I'm fighting these days: am I a good Democratic foot soldier or is it time to rethink the politics of my life from the bottom up? 

Let me put it baldly.  I don't think I can vote for Senator Obama.  His foreign policy seems naive, his economic policy untutored.  He preaches the politics of inclusion while speaking disdainfully and dismissively of a large portion of the electorate.  I don't give a damn about the slender threads which tie him to a member of the Weather Underground but I continue to be disturbed by his decision to sit in a pew for twenty years and listen to racist rhetoric.  Senator Obama "teaches" us when he should be engaging us.  He speaks of transforming us with little regard to how much we have already transformed ourselves.  There is not a question about anything he has said or done that Senator Obama can't answer with a little rhetorical misdirection.  All of that being said, Senator Obama will most likely - hell, will most probably - be the Democratic nominee and even if Hillary Clinton should be on the bottom half of the ticket, I just can't go there.

For me, a Democratic Party led by Senator Obama and Howard Dean becomes the Democratic Party that all my Republican friends have always told me it was: arrogant, elitist, self-rigteous and smug - a party from which I am increasingly estranged.  Should Senator Obama be elected - and I don't think he can be once the Republican underbelly sound bites him in the ass - his policies would be significantly different from those of the current administration but his sense of predestination would be exactly the same.  I may have to live under another eight years of an administation that thinks a dove came down from the heavens and landed on its shoulder, but I don't have to vote for it.