Politics: Why I Blog

When my young friends from New York were visiting in January of '08, just after I got my Imac so I could finish writing my first novel, they insisted I needed a blog.  They had to explain to me what a "Blog" was.  Web log?  WTF?  Why would I ever want to do that?  What a pointless endeavor, no one would ever read it.  And aside from working on a difficult manuscript, I didn't really have much to say.  Or so I thought.  1,365 posts later, I have discovered my voice.

It was a political season and I am a political animal.  There could not have been a better time for me to start a blog.  In the beginning of that political season, I was a Hillary supporter, but as the season progressed, I became an Obama supporter. I had begun to have readers and some of them were outraged that I, a feminist, would abandon Hillary.  It was our turn, as women, to put a woman in the White House and not as just First Lady, a term any feminist worth her salt should hate.  We are not "Ladies" we are women.  But it became clear to me that Hillary was not well served by the advise she was getting and that advise was coming from people she had chosen to run her campaign.  She was making rookie mistakes, acting like she was entitled to the nomination, as if it were a coronation and she was the heir apparent.  She was leaving States she'd lost without thanking her volunteers and supporters for their generous help and forgetting to congratulate the victor, her current boss.  She began to seem boorish and rude to me.  And I worried that if she won, she'd do the same thing as President; she'd put the same lousy advisers in positions of power, and she'd still be getting bad advise.

I'm not always sure Obama is all that well served by some of his adivser, but one person I'm positive he's getting and honest advise from is Hillary.  It was a brilliant move to offer her Secretary of State.  So we, the voters got a three-fer:  We got Barack, we got Hillary, and as a tripple player, we got Bill Clinton, the man we quietly call on when we need some charming arm twisting done in the troublesome South.