A few of you may remember some personal diaries I've posted over the last couple years. I'm not one of the big guns on this site, and I don't have the time to pull in and collate many of the stats I see and read online. Mostly, I'm just a dad who uses this site to vent a little about the frustrations that living in the U.S. sometimes causes.
I'm a 40 year old white man who is married to a wonderful 38 year old, black woman. We have two mixed race sons aged 1 and 3 years. That's me now.
In 1992, I was a precinct captain for the Clinton/Gore campaign in California. I worked my ass off for that campaign because I had grown incredibly weary of the divisiveness of the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle regimes. I wanted something better for this country and I felt that Bill Clinton and especially Al Gore could deliver that. Both men made me believe that America could move in a different direction.
Many of those beliefs were realized initially, but over time I saw the cost of Clinton's triangulation and focus on corporate fund raising in terms of Congressional losses and a growing disillusionment within the Democratic electorate. I honestly have come to believe that we could not have had a George W. Bush presidency without Bill Clinton's penchant for eeking out narrow victories and focusing on small, uninspiring victories. I believe he was a great politician, but a poor leader. In 1992, however, I just felt a huge sigh of relief and shed a few tears watching the Clinton motorcade head towards the State Capitol in Little Rock on election night.
In 2004, I cried tears of sadness. Less than three weeks before the birth of my first son, George W. Bush was re-elected. I was truly devastated that my son would be born into a country so divided and so ineptly led. I knew that his mixed race would be a burden on him as he grew older unless something changed in our country. Outside the birth of my son, the only truly inspiring thing i remember was a rousing speech by a little known Illinois state senator that gave me some hope for the future of our party.
In 2008, I began again to be hopeful. That hope was short lived as slowly but surely Hillary Clinton and her preppy looking thugs have been applying the same veiled, but divisive tactics used by Rove, Atwater and their ilk for the last twenty years. Her campaign has made clear to me that there is no place in Hillary Clinton's America for my two sons except as scared, subordinates to her and her ilk. How dare she. My only hope is that on election night this year, American voters have once again chosen hope.