but are there nuts in the bread?

recently i was at a dinner party and was asked who i favored as a political candidate.

i felt that my initial response [gagging and spitting my beer across the table] would be considered gauche, so i smiled sweetly and said 'you know, i haven't completely decided.' i tried to impart my philosophy [which admittedly i had determined that exact moment], namely, that political candidates are much like bread in the initial stages; what we have right now are a bunch of blobs of yeast half-risen and ingredients still congealing. nothing that can be considered dough ready for the oven, much less warm loaves of bread.

the older i get and the more informed i get, the more hopeless i feel. politicians, it seems to me, are all the same. it doesn't matter what their party affiliation, their leanings, or their "stances" on the "issues" - it's all a moot point and can change once they reach office. and do the subtle distinctions between candidates actually mean anything? is rudy guiliani that much better than hilary clinton. or vice versa? at this point, i would consider herbert hoover over any of the candidates. everyone sort of bleeds together, like cheap fabric dye in a public laundromat machine: the minutiae will culminate into an overall theme: we're fucked.

so at this dinner party, everyone started talking about how much they love barack obama. and i think that's great. i hope that the fervor these 11 people had for him translates across the country. i hope a fervor for one candidate means a fervor for change. clearly things here need to change. clearly people need to take a stand for change - to want to reverse decisions that aren't working out so well for us all right now. to help ourselves as a country and as a people. as far as i can tell, the list of things that need to change [health care, the iraq war, public education, the economy, our constitutional rights, and so on] is a lot longer than the list of things that don't need to change [our national anthem, baseball as the national pastime, the food pyramid, etc.].

i hope the next president can help the american people more than this current one has. this president, to hearken back to my bread metaphor, was definitely not ready to come out of the oven so soon.