And then there were two....

With the exit of John Edwards from the Democratic race for President, it's come down to a choice of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. My inclination at the moment is toward supporting Obama, simply because I don't want to see a two family dynasty in the White House over the span of an entire generation. Sometimes I worry that Obama is all flash and no substance, but I have read his books and he does seem like a pretty decent fellow overall. That the Democratic front runners are a woman and a black man is pretty historic in itself, and that bodes well for the country, but as much as I want to see a female President, I just don't think that Hillary is the one. She and Bill would be more co-Presidents than President and.....um......"First Spouse"(?). I know a lot of folks pine for the halcyon days of the Clinton Presidency when by all accounts, times were good, jobs were aplenty and the economy roared ahead, but what people tend to forget is that most of that was fueled by the dot-com boom, of which the bottom fell out in 2000 when it became apparent that it was all just smoke and mirrors and massive speculation. People have appallingly short memories of what things were like back then. Sure, it all seemed too good to be true, and guess what? It was. My mother always taught me that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was, and that maxim has served me well over the years. Sure, I wanted desperately to get in on the ground floor of some "next big thing" dot-com, but I'm glad that I didn't, because in the end, it all turned out to be one big nothing. I watched my friends lose high paying jobs in the tech sector and find themselves struggling to figure out how to pick themselves up and put the pieces of their lives back together again, and some of them are still doing that even now, years after the dot-com bust. And now the housing bubble has burst and all those folks who got in on that kind of shady speculation are losing their shirts, so again, what seemed too good to be true turned out to be just that.

So now we find ourselves with a narrowed field of choice if you're a Democrat, and if you're a Republican, well, you've still got Huckabee, McCain, Ron Paul (OK, a real dark horse long shot in the mold of Dennis Kucinich, but still hanging in there) and Mitt Romney. It's looking more and more like the Republican candidate may end up being John McCain, who, at 71, seems a bit old to be taking on the White House. He's not well liked by some of the hard-core conservatives, particularly the Religious Right, but lately, he's been cozying up to them to try to win their support. He's also not well liked because of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill and the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. A lot of hard core social conservatives don't like him and can only hope that the Dems nominate Hillary as their candidate, which will whip them into a frenzy of effort to depose her efforts to win the White House. That she's such a polarizing character and so deeply hated by Republicans doesn't bode well for an end to the bitter partisan politics that have ripped apart Washington in recent years if she should somehow win the White House. If she is nominated, we could well end up with a President McCain and four more years of Bush-like politics in Washington. We'll probably end up attacking Iran and plunging even deeper into destructive wars in the Middle East if McCain is elected President. God help us all if that happens.