Call me Hamlet

Well I guess I’m just Hamlet, unsure and uncomfortable with my choices. I’ve already changed my mind a couple of times (in my mind if not in print), and I may switch a couple more times before November. This condition puts me in awe of the total confidence and certainty so many of you have for your man Obama.

At best, I’m at about the 60% level for McCain – down from higher levels, after the Palin pick and as the tone of his campaign degenerated, although I understand the political conditions that made him think they were necessary.

But you! You are impressively certain. No point conceded and no doubt shown. I sincerely hope that if I’m still writing this blog a year or two from now that you’ll all be saying, “I told you so,” as President Obama delivers on the vision you’re buying.

That said, I’m a little surprised at the amount of grief I’ve taken for daring to even raise the question of who is the better man for these times. (It came more in private emails than in blog comments, but they were stinging none-the-less.)

I ask these questions because Presidents tend to surprise us. It was the conservative, Texan, military man Eisenhower who sent the Army to Little Rock to integrate the schools. It was the liberal icon Kennedy who first sent troops to Viet Nam and who invaded Cuba. LBJ voted with the worst southern racists in the Senate for decades before pushing the most comprehensive civil rights laws ever through Congress. The communist-baiter Nixon opened relations with China. The liberal, master politician Clinton blew health care reform through political ham-handedness, and then made welfare reform the most notable achievement of his eight years in office. And anyone knowledgeable on the topics will tell you that the hated George W. Bush has done more than any other world leader to solve the crisis in Darfur and of AIDS in Africa.

So just eight years after we first elected a man with a political career too short to have generated a record that revealed much about him, it seems to me a worthwhile exercise to ask these questions about a man who walks but leaves few footprints.