Most people around me know my opinions on a lot of contentious issues. My political position has been firmly right-of-center for a very long time. Though I’m considered liberal on certain social issues, on matters concerning the economy and foreign policy, I fall firmly on the conservative side of the spectrum. I am openly in favor of NAFTA and free trade. I have a strongly Friedman–influenced ideal of economics. I unashamedly supported and continue to support the US mission in Iraq, even if I continue to decry Bush’s folly of attempting the whole SNAFU on a shoestring budget. I have gone so far as to defend the necessity of Guantanamo Bay (before you burn me at the stake, I’ll just say in my defense that I’ve forsworn this position – Guantanamo does far more damage to America’s attempts at quelling militant Islam than is justified by the overt benefits it has yielded).

Yet, again and again I find myself attracted to Barack Obama. When Obama speaks, I can’t help but feel…uplifted. The ideals that he represent transcend mere politics and, indeed, intellectual pragmatism. Obama promises to heal partisan wounds, open up a new chapter in American history unfettered by the social and cultural baggage of the baby-boomer generation, unmired in the outdated black-and-white us-or-them apocalyptic Cold War mentality. Someone who is willing and able to confront the new challenges of my…our generation, our Millenium instead of refighting old battles for old reasons. Obama, above all, is one of…us.

OUR candidate.

OUR man.

Obama the man seems to transcend the scars and bitterness of a weary world, even as Obama the candidate makes my skin crawl with his erratic foreign policy proposals and dysfunctional economic plotlines. I agree with John McCain on the Big Issues – Iraq, Economy. While I’ve been given pause with his taxation backtracking and his retraction of his calling Falwell and his minions “agents of intolerance” (now THERE is a quote worth a thousand guns for a thousand years!), in a straight up match of policies, John McCain is the man to vote for. And I will still (if I could…) vote for him.

But Obama promises more than policies. He promises the renewal of the American Dream. There is no backing away from that. So while I’d vote for McCain, I say a prayer every night for President Barack Obama – that he might…just might…be more than just a dream.